Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor [1 ed.] 9783319954714, 3319954717

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ZACHARY DUNBAR & STEPHE HARROP

GREEK TRAGEDY AND THE CONTEMPOR ARY ACTOR

Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor

Zachary Dunbar • Stephe Harrop

Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor

Zachary Dunbar Victorian College of the Arts University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Stephe Harrop Liverpool Hope University Liverpool, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-95470-7    ISBN 978-3-319-95471-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958142 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tom Van Heel @ Sapphire&Steel Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For FM and DW

Acknowledgements

No one knows enough to write a book like this, and the enterprise wouldn’t even have been attempted (never mind completed) without the generous support of many colleagues and friends. At various stages, David Balding, Gilli Bush-Bailey, Emma Cole, Kris Darby, Tony Fisher, Lucy Jackson, Fiona Macintosh, Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Ben Naylor, Peter Olive, Declan Patrick, Simon Perris, Jonathan Statham, Marchella Ward, Thomas Wilson,  Martin Wylde, and Yana Zarifi have all been valued sources of advice, encouragement, and practical help. In addition, many of the ideas and exercises contained in this volume have been thought-through, talked-through, and worked-through with our students at Liverpool Hope University, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne). We’re grateful to all of them for their openness, energy, and insight. Grateful thanks are also due to the companies of Delphi, Texas (2005), The Ballad of Eddy Tyrone (2007), The Cows Come Home (2008), Alcestis (2012 and 2013), Bacchai (2013), Ion (2014), Bird-Tongue Oedipus (2014), Helen (2015), Andromache (2016), The Suppliant Women (2017), AntigoneX (2018), and Iphigenia in Tauris (2018).

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Contents

1 Introduction   1 2 The Aristotle Legacy  27 3 The Stanislavski Legacy  53 4 Acting Sound  79 5 Acting Myth 115 6 Acting Space 149 7 Acting Chorus 185 8 Conclusions 219 Index 231

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In Greek tragedy, it’s important to know who you’re talking to. But it isn’t always easy. In a theatre culture where all performers were male, and wore masks, and where a maximum of three actors shared all the major character roles, you couldn’t tell who you were looking at by sight. So, again and again, tragedy’s characters have to make wary inquiries. In Aeschylus’ play Libation Bearers (458 BCE),1 long-separated siblings Electra and Orestes recognize each other by physical tokens: her foot neatly matches his footprint, their hair is the same texture and shade, and he carries a piece of fabric she wove as a child. Half a century later, Euripides’ dramatization of the same mythic story in Electra (c.410 BCE) pours scorn on this procedure; a woman’s foot would be smaller than a man’s—this Electra argues—while siblings don’t have the same hair, and a grown man doesn’t still wear a garment woven for a boy. Across a series of plays dealing with the troubled children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Greek tragedy powerfully, playfully highlights the importance—and the difficulty—of reliably knowing who you’re speaking to. In Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides, c.420–412 BCE), things are more complex still. Here, a captive Orestes point-blank refuses to utter his own name, meaning that Iphigenia (his older sister, long presumed dead) can’t recognize the brother she last saw as a baby. Unable to fathom the ­stubborn silence of this Greek stranger, Iphigenia asks, ‘Is it too big a name to tell?’ (trans. McLeish in Walton & McLeish 1997a, 138). Which is perhaps a good way to think about the ‘actor’ addressed in the title of this book. © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_1

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Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor was initially conceived as a volume to support students training at UK conservatoires: international cohorts of young people studying the acting of Greek tragedy as part of an emerging professional skill set. On this basis, the book set out to combine historical surveys, discussions of contemporary theatre practice, and practical exercises which could be applied in the studio or rehearsal room, seeking to weave together the disparate strands of knowledge—intellectual, experiential, and embodied—which might add up to a professional competence in the re-performance of ancient plays. However, like the tragic siblings Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia, the volume’s authors have undertaken some major journeys since this beginning. Today, we find ourselves working on different continents, in very dissimilar contexts. And our sense of who ‘the actor’ is has expanded accordingly. Some sections of this book emerge from work undertaken within university actor-training programmes in Australia, which—like their counterparts in the USA—have an active vocational emphasis; they aim to prepare students to seek employment in the theatre, film, and TV industries. To this end, such programmes often reinforce training traditions which centre upon commercially focused psychological acting approaches (although local cultures and practices may infuse and shape the range of cross-hatched training on offer). However, other portions of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor draw on creative explorations undertaken with UK university students, whose approach to ancient tragedy may be very different. Such students may plan to pursue professional careers onstage, but they are learning within a culture where adaptation, devising, storytelling, and site-specific practice are understood to be key capabilities of the self-sustaining contemporary artist, and where the texts and stories of Greek tragedy are more likely to be positioned as provocations for independent performance-making than as fixed scripts to be acted. Other elements of this volume develop from its authors’ own experiments in professional theatre-making (both in Australia and the UK), or their engagement with the work being generated by graduate companies. And so, issues overlapping with directorial perspectives have also started to infuse the project, giving rise to important new questions. How might particular tragic encounters be staged in relation to a range of spaces and places? How can the actor’s embodied, imaginative explorations of a text or role potentially inform such choices? And what is the balance of creative responsibility within a company or ensemble practically attempting to

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f­ ormulate responses to such questions? Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor is making its way into the world at a moment when the status and authority of ‘the actor’ is under intense scrutiny. However, the discussions presented here operate on the basis that the present-day (or emerging) actor is an intellectually engaged creative artist, who may well be a skilled and empathetic collaborator, but who does not automatically defer to the inherited power structures associated (particularly in western theatre) with the singular, authoritative figure of the director. According to this view, actors are self-determining agents, and therefore—at least to some degree—self-directing.2 As this volume will explore, today’s actors may assume authority and creative authorship in ways which radically exceed the expectations of previous generations, and Greek tragedy—rooted in a collective, choral dramaturgy—offers a richly provocative opportunity for exploring such potentials. Across this range of settings and contexts, the variety of identities and aspirations which might characterize the ‘contemporary actor’ is vast; it’s almost (as Iphigenia suggests) ‘too big a name to tell’. And the range of motivations which might spur such artists to explore tragedy is concomitantly wide. But here are a few indicative possibilities. If you’re an actor-­ in-­training, seeking a practical grasp of how to act in Greek tragedies as well as an intellectual understanding of the genre’s major challenges, this book aims to introduce an essential body of skills, exercises, and ideas that will help you become an informed interpreter of ancient plays. If you’re an emerging theatre-maker, keen to explore how the texts of tragedy can provoke imaginative revisions and re-appropriations, or how the skills of acting tragedy can help shape ensemble practices and identities, this book aims to offer inspiration, provocation, and practical support for your project. If you’re a teacher or director, looking for new ways to make ancient plays come alive, this book aims to equip you with a variety of practice-­ based approaches to classroom or studio explorations, which you can mix-­ and-­match, or build upon, as your own situation and imagination suggest. If you’re a curious reader, wishing to find out more about Greek drama and dramaturgy, and contemporary approaches to these, this book aims to provide an engaging—if necessarily partial—account of the ways in which current artists interpret, adapt, and transform ancient theatre practices. However, it also aspires to tempt you onto your feet, at least once, to experience the performance potentials of ancient tragedy for yourself. To all these readers, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor begins by issuing a challenge—to abandon two fundamental assumptions, which

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(in the experience of the volume’s authors) almost all of our students, colleagues, and collaborators bring to the task of acting tragedy. The first is that an ancient tragic drama may be treated just like a modern play-text, peopled by naturalistically motivated characters, with complex inner lives, whose journeys through the play follow logical, legible, and uninterrupted arcs. The second is that an ancient drama’s author will have adhered to classical principles of plotting, presenting a narrative focused upon a hero’s ‘tragic fall’, resulting in a play-text which obeys a series of structural rules, and therefore offers a predictably organized series of intense emotional effects. Taken in combination, these assumptions can be understood to imply that the familiar creative task of imaginatively inhabiting a character role through Stanislavski-derived psychological analysis, supported by a ‘correct’ intellectual understanding of a classical text (read as operating in accordance with Aristotelian rules), lies at the heart of acting ancient tragedy. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor deliberately sets out to challenge these assumptions, contending that the surviving texts of Greek tragedy, understood both in relation to their earliest performance culture and to contemporary acting and theatre-making practices, offer a much richer and more demanding set of provocations. It begins from the premise that when you hold a text derived from ancient Greek tragedy in your hands, that moment constitutes an encounter with a multi-modal performance score, which potentially requires the present-day actor to engage with breath, sound, music, song, storytelling, space, architecture, embodiment, transformation, and choral or ensemble practices—or any combination of these. What tragedy demands is not simply intellectual and emotional identification with a particular character role—the modern classical tradition, which privileges psychological analysis, or its Americanized iteration in the form of ‘Method’ studio work. Rather, this book contends, the multiple challenges of ancient tragedy call for an actor who is eclectically, holistically, and playfully engaged in exploring (and perhaps pioneering) interactions between formally alien, and only partially documented, historical theatre practices and a wide variety of contemporary approaches to acting and theatre-making. In this way, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor aims to equip its readers with the knowledge and confidence to encounter Greek tragedy on its own, intensely demanding, terms. The model of tragedy presented here isn’t solely focused on the individual experience of a heroic or anguished protagonist, but adopts a wider perspective on tragedy as an ancient genre which incorporated poetry and

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song, provocatively intertextual myth-making, elaborate choreography and culturally loaded spatial vocabularies, and the embodied complexity and eloquence of the tragic chorus.

1.1   Reading About Tragedy Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor aims to give today’s actors a new set of perspectives on the challenge of performing ancient tragic plays, but this project would not have been possible without the vital work of many preceding scholars. Within classical scholarship, what is often described as a ‘performative turn’ took place in the final few decades of the twentieth century. This ‘turn’ was characterized by a new sense that performance analysis could play a central role in understanding Greek drama, an insight associated with the pioneering work of Oliver Taplin, and subsequently with the research centre he co-founded with Edith Hall in 1996, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at the University of Oxford.3 Taplin also authored two groundbreaking volumes, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) and Greek Tragedy in Action (1978), both of which made the crucial argument that ‘scenic presentation’ (a term encompassing the choreographed movement of actors in and through tragedy’s mimetic space) was a central concern of the tragic playwright. He asserted that this: […] is not an inessential external feature or a gross and incidental encumbrance; it is part and parcel of the play’s handiwork, and is an inextricable element of his communication and hence of his meaning. (1977, 2)

This argument is based on Taplin’s understanding that ‘the full meaning of the words cannot be divorced from their enactment’ (2), a perspective which (taking its cue from Shakespeare studies) rediscovered the writers of ancient tragedy as practical and multi-skilled ‘men of the theatre’ rather than purely literary artists (13) and, in so doing, invested the performer with a role in unlocking and communicating a tragedy’s meaning. However, this positive assessment of the function of the tragic actor is limited by its position within an analysis which treats the author as authoritative, his dramatic meaning as immutable, and his words as the chief constituent of theatrical performance (note that both communication and meaning, in the quote above, are explicitly designated as ‘his’). Taplin asserts that the action of a tragedy is encoded in a kind of ‘grammar’ (1),

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and that the ancient playwright’s dramaturgical intentions can—and must—be discerned through a close reading of the play’s surviving text.4 This reading of Greek stagecraft operates upon the basis that the actor’s role is to serve the (singular, knowable, and unchanging) intention of the tragic playwright, as preserved in the words of an ancient play, a proposition which—as the present volume will contend—privileges Aristotelian logocentrism over the dynamic, embodied business of creating new performances and theatre works.5 The rise of the discipline of classical reception studies, and in particular the work of interdisciplinary researchers connected with the APGRD, signalled the emergence of a more sustained focus on the work of real (rather than ideal) actors in the transmission and transformation of Greek tragedy on modern stages. Volumes with titles like Medea in Performance: 1500–2000 (2000) have highlighted this new awareness of modern performance as a site in which tragedy has acquired a wide range of new manifestations and meanings. Such collections frequently include essays by, and interviews with, living theatre practitioners, reflecting on their projects and practices. To begin with (and perhaps indicative of classical scholarship’s lingering sense of text, and authorial intention, as key determinants of a play’s meaning), the practitioner voices most often included were those of translators and playwrights, but recent volumes have engaged with a more diverse range of theatre-makers. For example, in Fiona Macintosh’s 2010 volume The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World, movement director Struan Leslie reflects on the ways in which his practice has been influenced by Doris Humphery’s technique of ‘fall and recovery supported by the breath’ (413), and the use of ‘bubble space’ in order to help develop a choral community’s skills in ‘reacting’ and ‘yielding’ (416); Suzy Willson of Clod Ensemble outlines how her choral practices utilize the neutral mask of Jacques Lecoq, and applies principles drawn from Lecoq’s pedagogy to develop choreographic languages based on natural phenomena (423); and Yana Zarifi documents the choral practices developed by Poland’s Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices (389–410). In this way, much valuable dialogue between researchers and creative practitioners has been initiated, and stimulating accounts of Greek tragedy’s afterlives in different times, places, and contexts have become much more readily accessible to the curious reader. Scholars beyond the classical reception community have also generated enlightening accounts of how contemporary adaptors, directors, and theatre-­ makers have responded to the provocations of ancient drama

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(Laera 2013; Rodosthenous 2017). This volume is particularly indebted to the work of David Wiles, whose Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (2000) articulated an invigorating sense of interplay between historic and present practices, with images from ancient vases being answered by leaping Kathakali-style dancers, meticulously composed stage-pictures, or circles of modern choral dancers in dusty ancient orchestras. Wiles’ use of analogues from global theatre and performance practices to illustrate certain qualities of ancient drama acknowledges the fact that (in their use of music, song, and dance, their representation of divine beings, and their choral dramaturgies) such plays present technical challenges far beyond the limits of conventional realist acting.6 However, while such information may educate and provoke the actor, it will not train them, because such works do not attempt the sustained articulation of studio practices, nor provide a detailed account of the training/acting methods used by different artists as they encounter Greek tragedy. The same limitation applies to Simon Goldhill’s volume How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (2007), the title of which is, in this regard, rather misleading. The book directly addresses itself to ‘the problems of producing Greek tragedy from the perspective of a modern company’ (2), and begins with an anecdote about the author being asked to recommend reading for Vanessa Redgrave, then preparing to play Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his own recognition that ‘it was actually rather difficult to recommend a book or even an article that would fit the bill’ (1). The result is an informed survey of the problems of staging Greek tragedy today, and one which begins to articulate some crucial questions—but which doesn’t necessarily offer any practical solutions to the acting challenges it outlines. For example, while acknowledging that approaching tragic roles and scenes ‘in terms of modern “hunt the motivation” has proven a deeply unsatisfactory enterprise’ (111), and that tragedy’s lack of domestic spaces causes problems for the actor who has been trained ‘to discover a private intimacy and internalized feelings as the most powerfully expressive form of acting’ (107), Goldhill—a distinguished classicist, but not a theatre scholar or practitioner—is not able to articulate any sustained alternative to the realist paradigm he critiques. The only book explicitly aimed at actor training in this area is scholar-­ practitioner Graham Ley’s Acting Greek Tragedy (2014), which is based on his experience of teaching undergraduate students in a rehearsal studio environment. For Ley, the task of acting Greek tragedy centres upon the actions, or ‘transactions’ (1), that take place between characters. Ley’s

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structure is built around four key themes: monologues, dialogues, three-­ actor scenes, and the handling of symbolic properties. The result is a book which is principally focused on the individual roles which, the author argues, must be ‘the building blocks for any modern reproduction’ of tragedy (13). This assumption reflects both prevailing theatrical ideology (that the individual tragic character speaks more compellingly to an individualist age than the collective chorus) and economic realism (choral training is, of necessity, an extended process, beyond the financial means of many companies). But this choice also risks significantly misrepresenting a form of theatre in which the interaction between protagonist and chorus is a key dramaturgical principle (53–5). As Ley admits, the practice of using a single actor as ‘an indicative chorus and a reference point’ (50), to ‘enhance and make sense of realizations of the scripts for actors’, amounts to a ‘major distortion’ (229). The building blocks Ley offers to the actor also begin from an interpretive analysis of dramatic text, which locates ‘transactions’ between actors through a psychological analysis of their characters’ motivations and behaviours. This perspective, while useful, derives from Konstantin Stanislavski’s early, psychologically based practices, and therefore falls short of engaging with current syntheses of analytical and physical techniques, and contemporary actor-training approaches, which draw on Stanislavski’s extended pedagogic explorations of the psychophysical. This default focus on acting approaches associated with Stanislavski’s early teaching practice, it is here argued, is a recurring problem for the would-be actor of tragedy, leading to a distorting overemphasis on the psychological and emotional experiences of individual characters, while downplaying tragedy’s demand for performers capable of navigating complex mythic narratives through collective sound, storytelling, and transformative spatial negotiation. And it is odd, in a twenty-first-century context, that this should be the case. In other areas of actor training, sustained and critical scholarship on Stanislavski and his legacy has resulted in a contemporary reception of his practices which stresses their variety, their experimental quality, and their psychophysical and ensemble potentials (see further Chap. 3). The skill of an individual actor in conveying the intense emotional effects of a celebrated character role may be part of this picture, but it is very far from being the whole story. So, why should so many books on the re-performance of Greek tragedy treat this approach as the default (even, perhaps, ‘canonical’) setting for serious actors today? Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor contends that this recurring ­adoption

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of outdated notions of acting practice is underpinned by a much older critical tradition which, following the ancient philosopher Aristotle (and his Renaissance editors), treats the shocking or pitiful experience of a drama’s protagonist as the major focus of tragic plays’ structure and meaning. Despite the abundant and often excellent scholarship on Greek tragedy and its performers which has appeared in recent decades, Aristotle’s ­writings (and their quasi-canonical misrepresentations) continue to exert a powerful, if often subterranean, influence on such discussions.7 As this volume contends, it is the authority habitually accorded to Aristotelian interpretations of tragic dramaturgy—individualist, psychologizing, and systematizing—which makes acting approaches based on Stanislavski’s early pedagogic practices (rooted in character analysis, and the psychologically plausible pursuit of tasks and objectives) seem like the logical approach to adopt. However, a more assertively critical reading of the particular emphases (and absences) associated with Aristotelian analysis potentially opens the way for a fuller understanding of the acting challenges presented by Greek tragedy. This revisionary perspective aims to re-position the surviving texts of tragedy as multi-modal and provocative performance scores, which significantly exceed the resources of Stanislavski’s early acting pedagogy, and which, instead, challenge the contemporary actor to develop a skill set (parts of which may productively be aligned with Stanislavski’s longer-term development of an integrated acting pedagogy) encompassing psychophysical sensitivity, narrative playfulness, spatial poetry, and collaborative transformation. Before this argument is made at length, however, it is important to pause over a few crucial questions. What is Greek tragedy? Who is the contemporary actor? And how does this volume aspire to support the work of the latter in creatively exploring a demanding, and often misunderstood, ancient dramatic genre?

1.2   What Is Greek Tragedy? The dramatic genre of tragedy emerged in Greece towards the end of the sixth century BCE, and by the early decades of the fifth century theatrical contests had been formalized as part of civic and religious life in the city-­ state of Athens. The precise origins of tragedy are unknown, though Aristotle claimed that it emerged from songs and dances performed in honour of the Olympian gods (Poetics, 1449a), while other ancient sources

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report that Thespis was the first performer to have exchanged dialogue with the choir, creating the dynamic interaction between protagonist and chorus which constituted the basis of tragic dramaturgy.8 Although they should not be mistaken for a reliable history, such quasi-mythic tales may be telling. Neither suggests that tragedy was primarily driven by writers, nor that formal texts were a precondition for theatrical performances to be initiated. Instead, the earliest tragic performances seem to have emerged from communal songs, dances, and ritual re-enactments of religious and heroic narratives, and from a community which already possessed talented and inventive performing artists. So, perhaps the first answer to the question posed above should be that tragedy was never straightforwardly identified with words on the page; the emergent form was a rich and artful synthesis of song, dance, and story, with newly devised plays drawing cultural authority from the contexts within which performances were initiated, and from their subject matter. Tragedy rarely told new stories, but instead re-shaped and re-­interpreted a body of familiar myth concerning the deeds and sorrows of the gods, their semi-divine offspring, and the larger-than-life heroes of an earlier age. These stories were familiar from recitations of epic poetry, from religious songs and rituals, and as the stuff of household tales, but as the genre of tragedy developed through the fifth century BCE, playwrights multiplied and re-combined existing tales, giving rise to a corpus of tragic narratives rich in intertextual artistry. Occasionally, plays dealing with real-­ life topics seem to have been allowed. Aeschylus’ Persians, first performed in 472 BCE, dealt with the celebrated victory of the Greek allies over forces of the mighty Persian Empire at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE). However, such deviations from mythic subject matter seem to have been rare, and were perhaps risky. In 493 or 492 BCE, a tragedian called Phrynichus wrote another play dealing with recent history, which lamented the fate of a conquered Greek city. However (according to Herodotus), The Fall of Miletus caused the whole theatre to break out into violent weeping, meaning that the playwright was fined for ‘reminding them of a disaster that was so close to home’ and his play was banned from any repeat performance (6.21).9 Perhaps this example may help to explain why Athens’ playwrights preferred to devote their poetic inventiveness to the virtuosic re-visioning of inherited tales.10 The civic, ritual, and competitive contexts within which tragedies were performed also helped shape the developing genre. The major occasion on which plays were performed was the Great Dionysia (of which more in

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Chaps. 4 and 6), a spring festival in honour of the god of wine and transformation, a factor which may additionally have played a role in dictating which themes were considered suitable for theatrical development. Since the festival was state-sponsored, the sanction of designated officials was required for each new production, and the allocation of state funding— which permitted a playwright to recruit, train, and equip an acting company—was a mark of civic trust and approbation.11 Plays performed at the Great Dionysia were also presented within a competitive structure, and had to conform to a set of customary rules, which ensured a level playing field for all. This seems to be the reason why all surviving Greek tragedies can be performed by three principal actors (often taking on multiple roles) plus a chorus, and may explain the basic tragic structure of five choral odes (extended songs), interspersed with a series of dramatic ‘episodes’ (encounters with or between the play’s main characters), often bookended by a prologue and epilogue. Yet, within these structures, Greek tragedy was a form which continued to evolve, with playwrights keenly observing one another’s innovations, and regularly testing the limits of the genre’s formal constraints. The Athens of the fifth century BCE was not a theatre culture which repeated a few familiar ‘classics’, but a vibrant and contentious arena for the competitive development of new, sometimes challenging, accounts of inherited storylines, which—for all their mythic or archaic settings—could examine political or ethical issues of real concern to the city. A fair definition of tragedy, then, might be a serious play on a mythic or heroic theme (incorporating a sizeable dose of suffering, grief, or anguish), containing music and dance, its dramaturgy rooted in interactions between individual actors and a collective chorus.12 The scripts of tragedy were working documents, which might be referred to or edited by the playwright (who was usually responsible for staging his own works) during rehearsals, but which didn’t become culturally important artefacts in their own right until the next century (see further Chap. 2). During the period under discussion, tragedy wasn’t so much a fixed canon of literary works, as a permanently evolving set of poetic and theatrical practices, brought into being on the breath and through the bodies of its makers. Despite big gaps in the historical record, some major creative figures do emerge from this period. The corpus of extant tragedies contains seven plays attributed to Aeschylus (c.525–455 BCE). Most celebrated today as the author of the Oresteia—the only complete trilogy of plays which survives from the fifth century BCE—in his own time he was famous for the

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heightened poetic register in which his plays were composed and sung. Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (405 BCE) ends with a poetry competition in which Aeschylus’ verses are weighed using a set of scales; a backhanded compliment to the playwright’s enduring reputation for handling powerful dramatic themes with gravitas and grandeur. Another seven surviving plays were written by Sophocles (c.496–406 BCE), frequently praised for the poetic intensity and meticulous plotting of his dramas, and for his skilful deployment of dramatic irony, as superlatively exemplified in Oedipus the King. Often feted by present-day critics as the greatest ancient poet, Sophocles is reported to have won more dramatic prizes than any of his rivals. But Euripides (c.484–406 BCE), the last of the three writers whose plays have been preserved from the fifth century BCE, has a very different reputation. Of the 18 of his plays which can be read today, many appear to ignore or subvert the structural and tonal qualities apparent in other tragedians’ works, presenting fractured plot lines, sudden shifts in mood, and unpredictable revisions of mythic stories. This was a playwright who shocked and fascinated his contemporaries by abandoning high-flown diction, dressing kings in rags, and filling the stage with passionately active female characters. The surviving canon of ancient plays may be partial, but it contains a rich mix of styles, techniques, and atmospheres. However, the tragic texts which survive today offer only partial glimpses of the ancient theatre culture within which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides developed and presented their works. Such written texts convey next to nothing of the music, songs, and dances which were always part of tragedy’s spectacle and affect. They contain few clues about the ways in which ancient actors inhabited and traversed stage space. They don’t tell us anything about how the tragic playwright, acting as didaskalos (teacher of the chorus), trained a group of non-professional performers to meet the demands of choral practice. Some texts are damaged or fragmentary, with whole passages irrecoverably lost to fire, flood, accident, or censorious hands.13 And a sizeable majority of the new plays produced in the fifth century BCE have been altogether lost, some with no more than titles recorded (Wright 2016). For the Greekless English-speaker, those plays that do survive are also always encountered through the medium of translation, adding another layer of complexity to attempts to imagine how an ancient text may have been brought to life on stage. The challenges of translating tragedy for contemporary performance have been surveyed in a range of scholarly works (see, for example McDonald 1991; Hardwick 2004, 2008,

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2010, 2013), and the task of translation/adaptation has inspired some of the finest modern writers to produce their own vivid re-imaginings and radical re-visions of ancient Athens’ surviving plays.14 However, the contemporary theatre-maker wishing to engage with ancient tragedy must always be mindful of the fact that theatrical translation can never be a neutral act; nor is a task limited to faithfully transferring words from one page to another.15 In this, as in other ways, the contemporary artist’s encounter with ancient tragic performance must always be understood as an act of creative re-making. The archaeological reconstruction of past performances is an impossibility; the challenge is to generate new responses to ancient texts and practices using all the imaginative and technical resources of the contemporary theatre artist.

1.3   Who Is the Contemporary Actor? As has already been indicated, there is no one way of defining a singular identity for the ‘contemporary actor’. However, such an artist is almost certainly called upon to train, create, and perform work in many different styles and contexts.16 They must be an athlete as well as an artist, dedicated to the cultivation of physical skills as well as emotional responsiveness and vocal eloquence. They must consciously develop a skill set which can be flexibly adapted to commercial jobs and alternative projects, to the demands of different media or platforms, and to the diverse opportunities which come with progressive life stages.17 The contemporary actor, as conceived in this volume, is also an intellectually curious and self-reflective practitioner, keen to understand how current theatrical practices emerged, how they relate to broader cultural histories, and how today’s theatre-­ makers can make an informed, active contribution to new or emerging approaches and forms. Today’s practitioner may also be engaged with politically inflected discourses concerning the status of the actor in relation to current economic, gender, racial, and cultural hierarchies. And, like artists everywhere, they are most certainly creative, hardworking, courageous, and resourceful. In seeking to support and stimulate such a protean figure, this volume does not observe any strictly defined boundary between ‘classical’ and contemporary training practices, instead operating on the pragmatic principle of borrowing from a range of modern approaches and disciplines to meet the specific demands of different elements of ancient tragic dramaturgy. In this, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor replicates the

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(de facto) creative interplay which has consistently characterized the overlapping histories of ‘classical’ and modern actor-training practices. In the twentieth century, the legacy of Stanislavski’s pedagogy infused what would become ‘classical’ actor training through the pioneering work of Jacques Copeau and his nephew, Michel Saint-Denis, whose students were taught to integrate ‘physical actions’ into their work on classical plays (Baldwin, 88). Saint-Denis’ work formed the basis of groundbreaking curricula at the London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic School (86–9), and a comparable model was subsequently adopted in the USA, contributing to an actor-training curriculum developed through the ‘League of Professional Theatre Training Program’, which included a consortium of 11 universities, such as Yale and New  York University, and which now underpins the work undertaken in most of the leading actor-training schools (Zazzali, 2). As this brief discussion indicates, any definitive untangling of what might constitute discrete ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ actor-training regimes remains elusive (maybe illusory), so Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor is both pragmatic and wide-ranging in its borrowings. The current volume’s eclecticism and hybridity may also be understood in relation to the range of current actor-training systems which are variably labelled as cross-, inter-, or trans-disciplinary, with which it shares an emphasis on the rehearsal and acting of tragedy as psychophysical processes (an argument developed in Chap. 3). This term, derived from Stanislavski’s long-term explorations of the interconnectedness of the actor’s mind and body, aims to articulate an acting experience which centres upon ‘what a body can do’ (Spatz 2015), on the kinds of knowledge inscribed in the conception and experience of the body, and the ways in which the mind (or the actor’s thinking work) is enfolded in the body’s sensations (Zarilli, Daboo & Loukes).18 Developments in cognitive science suggest that actions, images, and emotions are not necessarily the result of conscious thought, but may be generated through active experience (Blair; Johnson). Recent findings in neuroscience, for example, evidence how breathing, movement, and intuitive senses generate meaning and ideas before the brain is able to formulate them. Incorporating such insights into actor-training practice, somatic approaches teach performers to activate creative imagination using breath, encouraging the actor to consider the body and mind as one and the same thing.19 In the same way, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor invites the present-day practitioner to reconsider the priority customarily given to cognitive aspects of

 INTRODUCTION 

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the actor’s work; the result of skewed or partial readings of Stanislavski, underpinned by the particular terms of Aristotelian analysis. Instead, it challenges the contemporary actor to flexibly re-envision themselves (at various points) as singer,20 spatial poet, and physically committed chorus member, using tragedy’s dramaturgical and sensory prompts to widen and deepen the scope of the embodied imagination (Pavis, 62).21 Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor additionally understands the role of the contemporary actor to potentially include multiple aspects of the theatre-making process. In Theatre-Making (2013), Duŝka Radosavljević highlights the changing scope of the actor’s art, asserting that: University education in Drama, Theatre and Performance studies […] has in the latter half of the twentieth century produced multi-skilled, thinking artists capable of an integrated authorial practice which combines writing, acting, composing, directing and design.22 Theatre-making is therefore capable of embracing multi-professionalization as well as process—rather than product-­led theatre practices, and it may well soon call for a change to the current structures of professional theatre production. (194)

In Radosavljević’s influential model, the theatre-maker is an artist capable of fluidly moving between different tasks within a company, ensemble, or group of collaborators, assuming a set of responsibilities exceeding the traditional role of the actor, and becoming a multi-skilled maker of theatre works. This argument acknowledges ‘the unwillingness or inability of contemporary theatre-makers to occupy only one definition of the existing professional profiles of actor, writer, director, designer, composer, choreographer’, within a broader cultural context characterized by creative resistance to inherited artistic hierarchies (Radosavljević 2015). In some ways, this description of the range of roles a modern theatre-maker may take on across a career presents analogues with the expectations of fifth-­century Athens, where (according to tradition) the artists who bore responsibility for writing, staging, and acting in tragic plays often took on a range of theatrical jobs in the course of their creative lives (Hall, 16–17). Similarly, the contemporary actor addressed throughout this book is considered not only to be a skilled psychophysical artist (or artist-in-training), able to engage with multiple analytic and embodied approaches to creating a role, and with experience of training within and across several acting approaches, but also someone capable of c­ reating

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performance texts as well as interpreting them, devising new works as well as being directed, in fluid and flexible response to the changing landscape of professional artistic practice. All these aspects of the contemporary actor’s skill set will be engaged, at different moments, throughout Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor.

1.4   Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor This project emerges from its two authors’ experiences of teaching Greek tragedy in a range of conservatoire, university, studio, and rehearsal settings. It also draws on their experiences of adapting, directing, and staging Greek tragedy in industry contexts. On the basis of these pedagogic and professional encounters, it explores the recurring blocks and misconceptions which all too often prevent students from fully engaging with, and creatively exploring, the range of exciting stimuli presented by ancient plays. In direct response, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor stages a series of revisionist positions, beginning from the interrelated arguments that an uncritically Aristotelian reading of Greek tragedy, and a consequent emphasis upon early (individualist, analytic, psychologizing) elements of Stanislavski’s actor-training practice, can actually prevent actors from interacting productively with the texts and practices of the ancient Athenian tragic theatre. Chapter 2 (The Aristotle Legacy) contends that one of the key challenges of Greek tragedy within actor training is the actor’s prior (and often unconscious) absorption of Aristotelian, or pseudo-Aristotelian, theories concerning the nature and purpose of tragedy. Here, it is argued that uncritical and ahistorical deference to supposedly Aristotelean dictums can be one of the most significant obstacles to the contemporary actor’s effective engagement with Greek tragedy as a living theatre practice, leading them to both mislocate the problems ancient tragic drama poses, and misunderstand the manifold possibilities represented by the form’s challenges. This chapter contends that the perspective of the theatre historian, concerned with the relationships between play-texts, their performance and re-performance, and the ways in which these interact with changing cultural contexts, can help establish a clearer sense of how the Poetics might be responding to the particular conditions of tragic performance in the fourth (rather than the fifth) century BCE. This historicist critique informs a revisionary identification of Aristotle as a proto-Hellenistic figure, whose experience of theatregoing, and of accessing tragedy through writing, may

 INTRODUCTION 

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have been very different to that of the fifth century. A closing discussion highlights the ways in which inherited Aristotelian (and pseudo-­ Aristotelian) presumptions about the nature and function of tragedy set the stage for particular (mis)applications of Stanislavski-inspired practices. From page to stage, ‘realistic approaches to characterization’ habituate modern-day actors as they search for a psychological truth in performance (Gordon, 6), and Chap. 3 problematizes this heritage in relation to the multi-modal challenges of acting ancient tragedy. It critically interrogates the widespread practice of applying psychologizing work (derived mainly from Stanislavski’s early actor-training experiments, supported by popular receptions of Aristotle’s Poetics) to ancient plays, arguing that while such approaches may be potentially useful, they can also produce contradictory or vexing results, especially in relation to a form that frequently lacks logical through lines of action. The notion of portraying an internally consistent and logically motivated character may be seductive to the modern actor, conditioned to read the ancient dramatists in the same context as Chekhov and Ibsen. But as this chapter highlights, the characters of Greek tragedy frequently display none of the psychological plausibility (i.e. motivations emerging from subconscious yearnings) that such an alignment suggests. This mismatch can, however, be addressed by re-focusing attention on psychophysical aspects of Stanislavski’s actor-training pedagogy, and the various integrative training and acting practices which, today, draw upon this alternative legacy to create work through a synthesis of intellectual and embodied creativity. In this way, it is proposed, the would­be actor of tragedy can shift from being a primarily text-focused (logocentric) and intellectual interpreter of a dramatic role to embracing the full psychophysical potentials of re-performed tragedy, including body, breath, sound, storytelling, space, place, and chorus. The four chapters which follow—Acting Sound, Acting Myth, Acting Space, and Acting Chorus—each examine one of these aspects of Greek tragedy in detail. Each one begins with a suggestive ‘snapshot’ borrowed from one of the authors’ personal theatregoing, before combining a discussion of tragedy’s historical performance conditions with a survey of modern practitioners’ responses to key challenges, and a sequence of practical exercises which the reader is invited to experiment with—and develop—in their own training or rehearsal room. Chapter 4 (Acting Sound) focuses on the use of breath and sound in tragedy, understood as a ‘songful’ genre of performance, which requires

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its performers to negotiate between different registers and vocal styles, in an activation of text supported (at times) by shared breath. This discussion proposes that sound-making is a vital acting process for excavating the musical qualities and effects of tragedy, challenging the contemporary actor to discover an open-minded, open-throated receptivity to the multiple poetic and musical forms encoded in ancient plays. This chapter develops the argument that this combination of breath and sound simultaneously operates on a horizontal (the semantic narrative) and a vertical axis (deepening imaginative resources), which helps the actor to fully encounter and actualize the embedded musicality in a Greek tragic text. A case study focusing on a recently modernized version of Sophocles’ Antigone (adapted by Jane Montgomery Griffiths, and performed at The Malthouse, Melbourne, in 2015) also raises several important issues which link translation, somatic responses, and the actor’s body. The reader is then invited to pursue these ‘twisting negotiations’ (Griffiths, 226) through a sequence of practical exercises aimed at heightening awareness of somatic and sensory responses to tragedy’s surviving texts. Chapter 5 (Acting Myth) examines the ways in which a shared mythic canon was re-negotiated by Athenian artists of the fifth century BCE, a period during which old tales and songs were repeatedly re-interpreted and re-made to engage (and surprise) tragedy’s audiences. For a fifth-­ century theatregoer, ‘strange alternatives’ (Cannon in Walton & McLeish 1997b, 62) to theoretically ‘known’ mythic narratives were part of the pleasure of theatre attendance, and the tragic actor was therefore required to perform the role of skilled theatrical storyteller, making long narrative speeches vivid and engaging for an audience highly attuned to the various routes a drama might potentially take through a dense web of mythic stories. Connections between antiquity’s epic-singers and the extended speeches of tragedy, especially messenger speeches, are also explored, challenging recent scholarly claims concerning the absence of audience address from ancient performance. Tragedy’s formal borrowings from epic, and the genre’s consistent narrative playfulness, then provide the stimulus for this chapter’s practical provocations, which are informed by contemporary storytelling theatre (especially the work of UK-based Emma Rice and Kneehigh Theatre) and performance storytelling (the orally inspired, live, and unscripted re-composition of traditional narratives). This actively subversive approach to the re-performance of tragedy’s written narratives is finally located in terms of a ‘landscape of choices’ (Rice 2012) available to

 INTRODUCTION 

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contemporary theatre artists, who may elect to assume the ‘authorship’ (Radosavljević 2015) of their own, revisionary, tragic texts. Chapter 6, Acting Space, begins by introducing different conceptions of space present in the earliest performances of tragedy, using the categories of mimetic space, transformational space, community space, and agonistic space to identify the range of challenges and opportunities confronting the contemporary performer. It counters Aristotelian disdain for the practicalities of staging a play by developing a revisionary account of ancient playwrights as skilful practitioners of ‘spatial poetry’ (Monaghan, 243), and draws on Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints practices and Jacques Lecoq’s chorus exercises to explore how contemporary actors of tragedy can develop more attentive and provocative relationships with space and place, and with one another’s bodies in motion. This chapter also considers how current theatre-makers (like Mike Pearson) have re-­ engaged ancient tragic plays and narratives in site-specific contexts, and (through an extended exploration of The Suppliant Women, staged in 2016 by Actors Touring Company and The Lyceum, Edinburgh) addresses the social and political frictions which may be activated and examined through tragedy’s occupations and contestations of both theatrical stages and social spaces. In closing, this chapter challenges readers to consider how they might choose to negotiate different aspects of tragic spatial practice in relation to their own contexts and audiences. Chapter 7 (Acting Chorus) addresses perhaps the most daunting challenge facing the performer of tragedy today. When staging the chorus, today’s actors are likely to be perplexed by the conundrum of how much ‘like a character’ the chorus is meant to be, especially in relation to the conventions of modern realist theatre. This chapter re-frames this perennial question in terms of contemporary psychophysical acting practice, identifying how a range of key international practitioners (Katie Mitchell and Struan Leslie; Włodzimierz Staniewski and Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices; Clod Ensemble) have developed differently calibrated combinations of physical and psychological presence, realist characterization, and transformative choreography or musicality. This chapter’s practical exercises offer a progressive scheme of tasks, which starts with an amorphous, seemingly unformed chorus, then develops through a collectively sentient chorus, and ultimately, towards the exploration of a speaking (political) body of performers, and the transformative qualities of choral sound and presence. Acting Chorus finally proposes that the proportions of mimesis and of play must be uniquely and perpetually

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­ egotiated by each group that embarks upon the work of becoming a n Greek chorus—or of re-inventing choral practice on their own contemporary terms. Throughout, this volume draws on ideas and practices explored by its two authors across a range of universities and actor-training institutions, including Liverpool Hope University, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne). Different projects and contexts have stimulated the authors, at different times, to explore a range of techniques and approaches, varying from classical actor-training practices to collaborative story-making and site-specific devising. In addition, each of the authors brings their own creative practices and specialisms (directing, musical composition, performance storytelling) to their accounts of Greek tragedy’s performative potentials. And the specific contemporary productions and practitioners discussed reflect the range of locations (particularly in the UK and Australia) in which various sections of the book’s text have been developed. In consequence, the four practice-based chapters of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor present an eclectic range of case studies and provocations, with disciplinary assumptions and emphases shifting from moment to moment, in response to the range of challenges presented by ancient tragedy, and the ecologies of actor training today.23 Each of these chapters begins with a personal response from one of the volume’s authors to a given performance in a specific time and place, designed to bring into focus particular key issues for the performer of tragedy today. These responses stage a range of interpretative and critical positions. We each bring different experiences, tastes, and creative aspirations to our explorations of ancient plays, and these ‘snapshots’ aim to honestly reflect the evolving nature of each author’s understanding of— and affective engagement with—re-performed tragedy. The variety of performances evoked in these ‘snapshots’ might also helpfully demonstrate that there’s no one way of doing tragedy right. This book is not prescriptive. It does not offer a single, integrated method for achieving a particular set of results. Nor does it (despite its authors’ passionately held personal views) work from a fixed sense of what successful performances of tragedy should look like, or aspire to. Rather, this is a volume which critically reflects on history and theory, while offering practical provocations in the context of a training experience, highlighting the necessary interplay between past and present, scholarship and practice, interpretation and innovation, which lies at the heart of any

 INTRODUCTION 

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c­reative engagement with the multiple, and multi-modal, challenges of ancient tragedy. In Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (2000), David Wiles writes that the ‘main reason now for studying Greek plays is the opportunity which they provide to create performances in the present’ (2), a proposition which provides a vital point of departure for the current project. Above all, the provocations contained within Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor aim to invite (and empower) readers to generate their own ways of working, rooted in an informed understanding of the practical demands that tragic plays make of actors and theatre-makers at all stages of their professional development, and with a heightened awareness of the vast array of creative responses which these ancient dramas continue to inspire.

Notes 1. Throughout, this volume uses BCE (‘Before Common Era’) and CE (‘Common Era’) in place of BC and AD. 2. On the notion of self-determination or self-regulation across disciplines, see Bembenutty, Cleary & Kitsantas (2013). 3. http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/ (viewed 11 April 2018). 4. Taplin is at pains to distance himself from the disruptive influence of such ‘seminal’ theatre-makers and theorists as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and ‘the actor-lunatic Antonin Artaud’ (1977, 24). The scare quotes in the previous sentence are Taplin’s own, highlighting his distrust of a generation of theatre-makers whose ‘complete and arrogant independence’ renders the author’s text ‘a mere starting-point for improvisations’ and the writer himself ‘no more than a fine name’ (24). Later works of classical reception would offer a more positive appreciation of such practitioners and their re-invigoration of tragic performance, and the APGRD’s 2004 volume Dionysus Since 69 takes the theatrical revolution of the 1960s as the germinal moment for a range of contemporary approaches to the performance of ancient drama. 5. Notions of ‘logocentrism’, especially in relation to Aristotelian analysis and Stanislavski’s actor-training system, will be unpacked in Chap. 3. 6. In recent decades, intercultural collaborations and explorations have provided an important site for challenging western, realist models in relation to tragedy. A detailed survey of tragedy’s global receptions and transformations lies beyond the scope of this volume, but the reader may wish to begin by consulting Fischer-Lichte (1997, chapter 7), Hardwick (2004), Hardwick & Gillespie (2010), van Weyenberg (2013), Bosher et  al. (2015), Chatzidimitriou (2017), Glynn (2017), and Sampatakakis (2017).

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7. Aristotle’s reading of tragedy also lies at the root of many contemporary approaches to ‘the tragic’ as a philosophical, ethical, and/or aesthetic category (Lehmann 2016, 19–38), though Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor defines ‘tragedy’ in a more specific sense, as relating a particular corpus of ancient plays, and their associated performance practices. 8. In addition, theatre historians associate the incorporation of dramatic performances into the city’s festivals with the sixth-century innovations of the tyrant Peisistratos (Fischer-Lichte 2013, 77). 9. Quotation from Waterfield (1998). 10. A notable exception is the playwright Agathon, whose first production in Athens took place around 416 BCE (Wright 60), and who is reported to have written a drama—called Anthos or Antheus?—with an entirely invented plot and cast of characters (81–2). 11. For a fuller account of this process, see Hall (21–2). Athenian tragedy was state-sponsored, funded by an irregular tax upon the city’s richest citizens—the chorēgic liturgy. 12. This volume does not accept the premise that ancient Athenian tragedy cohered around a single key motif, concerning the ‘presumption and downfall’ of a ‘quasi-Icarian figure’ (Lehmann 2016, 9). Such a view is here understood to be a post-Aristotelian formulation (as discussed further in Chap. 2). 13. On the surviving evidence for tragedy, and its losses, see Fischer-Lichte (2013, 73–4). 14. On the difficulties and possibilities of working with tragedies in translation, see Goldhill (Chap. 5). 15. The translations quoted throughout this volume are those the two authors have themselves used in classes or rehearsals, or those they find most suitable for the focus of a given exercise. 16. In contemporary academic discourse, the essence of what an actor is or does remains a subject of much debate. The ‘actor’ and ‘acting’ have been subject to deconstructions and reconsiderations in light of gender studies, feminist theory, intercultural and performance studies, and various other post-structural discourses. What may apply to an actor, as the performer performing, may now relate to ‘any behaviour, event, action or thing that can be analysed in terms of doing, behaving, and showing’ (Schechner, 32). 17. On the contexts of actor training today, see Evans (xxx) and Watson (11–14). 18. However, it is not assumed here that psychophysical training is a generic product that has transferred unaltered across training institutes. In the

 INTRODUCTION 

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USA, the early adoption of psychophysical training recognized the multidisciplinary nature of its aims: ‘voice and speech courses complemented an amalgam of movement techniques, all of which were intended to produce performers capable of invoking the spoken and corporeal language of dramas ranging from Aeschylus and Euripides to Shakespeare and Stoppard’ (Zazzali, 44) 19. On the emergence of somatic practices further, see Eddy (2009). This subject is explored in greater detail in Chap. 3. 20. Stanislavski did not formally differentiate between the singer and the actor, perceiving both music and drama as scores to be systematically analysed, rehearsed, and performed. In teaching opera, he stated: ‘The music presents to you your inner state, the shades of your emotions, thus the inner rhythm of your life’ (Carnicke & Rosen, 132), just as the rhythm and tempo of a text suggest to the actor the emotional life of a fictional character. 21. The discussions and practical provocations in this book are not meant to resolve the dialectic of inner-outer expressions, or notions of mind-body. The present discussion operates on the basis that binary thinking is a natural neurological condition, which is arguably set in motion especially when confronting (or simulating as actors do) situations with emotional high stakes (Wood & Petriglieri, 31). 22. Radosavljević (2015) re-asserts the link between new sites of training and the emergence of the contemporary theatre-maker: ‘It is symptomatic that artists who declare themselves as “theatre-makers” have mostly emerged out of universities rather than drama schools. […] Their artistic ambitions are interdisciplinary and their understanding of theatre is performancerather than literature-oriented. In addition, growing class-sizes in British universities cultivate group-work and collaboration rather than individual artistic development.’ 23. Though some broad parameters may be observed. In particular, the present study does not directly address postdramatic tragedy (Lehmann 2006, 2013), a subject explored in Decreus (2010), Monaghan (2010), Zavros (2017), and Cole (2019).

References Baldwin, J. 2010, ‘Michel Saint-Denis: Training the Complete Actor’, in A. Hodge (ed.), Actor Training, Routledge, London, pp. 81–98. Bembenutty, H., Cleary, T.J. & Kitsantas, A. (eds). 2013, Applications of Self-­ Regulated Learning across Diverse Disciplines: A Tribute to Barry J. Zimmerman, Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC.

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Blair, R. 2008, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience, Routledge, London. Bosher, K., Macintosh, F., McConnell, J.  & Rankine, P. 2015, The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Carnicke, S. & Rosen, D. 2014, ‘A Singer Prepares: Stanislavsky and Opera’, in A. White (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, Routledge, London, pp. 120–38. Chatzidimitriou, P. 2017, ‘Tadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa: Reinventing the Greek Classics; Reinventing Japanese Identity After Hiroshima, in G. Rodosthenous (ed.), Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 93–110. Cole, E. 2019, Postdramatic Tragedies. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Decreus, F. 2010, ‘Does a Deleuzian Philosophy of Radical Physicality Lead to the “Death of Tragedy”? Some Thoughts on the Dismissal of the Climactic Orientation of Greek Tragedy’, in E.  Hall & S.  Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 123–36. Eddy, M. 2009, ‘A Brief History of Somatic Practices and Dance: Historical Development of the Field of Somatic Education and its Relationship to Dance’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5–27. Evans, M. (ed.). 2015, The Actor Training Reader, Routledge, Abingdon. Fischer-Lichte, E. 1997, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City. Fischer-Lichte, E. 2013, ‘Classical Theatre’, in D. Wiles & C. Dymkowski (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 73–84. Glynn, D. 2017, ‘Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides: Uncovering a Classic’, in G. Rodosthenous (ed.), Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 213–26. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gordon, R. 2006, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective, University of Michigan Press, Michigan. Griffiths, J.M. 2010, ‘Acting Perspectives: The Phenomenology of Performance as a Route to Reception’, in E. Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 219–31. Hall, E. 2010, Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hall, E., Macintosh, F. & Taplin, O. (eds). 2000, Medea in Performance: 1500–2000, Legenda, Oxford.

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Hall, E., Macintosh, F. & Wrigley, A. (eds). 2004, Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hardwick, L. 2003, Reception Studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hardwick, L. 2004, Translating Words, Translating Cultures, Bloomsbury, London. Hardwick L. 2008, ‘Translated Classics: Vibrant Hybrids or Shattered Icons?’, in A.  Lianeri & V.  Zajko (eds), Translation and the Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 341–66. Hardwick, L. 2010, ‘Negotiating Translation for the Stage’, in E. Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 192–207. Hardwick, L. 2013, ‘Translating Greek Plays for the Theatre Today: Transmission, Transgression, Transformation’, Target, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 321–42. Hardwick, L. & Gillespie, C. (eds). 2010, Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Johnson, M. 1990, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Laera, M. 2013, Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Peter Lang, Bern. Lecoq, J.  2002 [2000], The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, Methuen, London. Lehmann, H.T. 2006, Postdramatic Theatre, Routledge, Abingdon. Lehmann, H.T. 2013, ‘A Future for Tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic’, in J.  Carroll, S.  Giles & K.  Jürs-Munby (eds), Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 87–109. Lehmann, H.T. 2016, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, Routledge, Abingdon. Ley, G. 2014, Acting Greek Tragedy, University of Exeter Press, Exeter. Macintosh, F. (ed.). 2010, The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, Oxford University Press, Oxford. McDonald, M. 1991, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage, Columbia University Press, New York. Monaghan, P. 2010, ‘“Spatial Poetics” and Greek Drama: Scenography as Reception’, in E.  Hall & S.  Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 241–51. Pavis, P. 2003, Analyzing Performance, University of Michigan Press, Michigan. Radosavljević, D. 2013, Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Radosavljević, D. 2015, ‘10 Traits of Theatre-Making in the 21st Century’, Exeunt Magazine, viewed 8 January 2018, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/ ten-traits-of-theatre-making-in-the-21st-century/.

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Rice, E. 2012, ‘The Essay: On Directing’, BBC Radio 3, viewed 8 January 2018, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bw8hv. Rodosthenous, G. (ed.). 2017, Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London. Sampatakakis, G. 2017, ‘Dionysus the Destroyer of Traditions: The Bacchae on Stage’, in G. Rodosthenous (ed.), Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 189–212. Schechner, R. 2002, Performance Studies: An Introduction, Routledge, London. Spatz, B. 2015, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, Routledge, London. Taplin, O. 1977, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Taplin, O. 1985 [1978], Greek Tragedy in Action, Methuen, London. van Weyenberg, A. 2013, The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy, Rodopi, Amsterdam. Walton, J.M. & McLeish, K. (eds). 1997a, Euripides: Plays IV, Methuen, London. Walton, J.M. & McLeish, K. (eds). 1997b, Euripides: Plays V, Methuen, London. Waterfield, R. (trans.) 1998, Herodotus: The Histories, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Watson, I. 2015, ‘The Purpose of Actor Training’, in M. Evans (ed.), The Actor Training Reader, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 9–20. Wiles, D. 2000, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wood, J.D. & Petriglieri, G. 2005, ‘Transcending Polarization: Beyond Binary Thinking’, Transactional Analysis Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 31–9. Wright, M. 2016, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy 1: Neglected Authors, Bloomsbury, London. Zarrilli, P., Daboo, J. & Loukes, R. 2013, Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Zavros, D. 2017, ‘Jan Fabre’s Prometheus Landscape II: [De]territorialisation of the Tragic and Transgressive Acts of Arson’, in G.  Rodosthenous (ed.), Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 167–88. Zazzali, P. 2016, Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education, Routledge, Abingdon.

CHAPTER 2

The Aristotle Legacy

This chapter begins by thinking about what the contemporary actor brings with them when they walk into the studio or rehearsal room. Many may hope to encounter Greek tragedy without preconceptions, but a bit of reflection often reveals that this isn’t the case. For example, at some stage in the actor’s education, they’ve almost certainly experienced a lecture drawing upon Aristotle’s ideas concerning the nature and purpose of tragedy. This lecture will often have outlined the ‘rules’ of Greek tragedy, attributing them to Aristotle’s text, the Poetics. It may have contained the information that tragedy always focuses on a lofty figure—a king or hero. It probably explained that this hero’s ‘fatal flaw’ or hubris causes him to fall from his high position, in a narrative which evokes in watchers feelings of fear and pity, leading to a sense of catharsis.1 It perhaps asserted that Aristotle demands tragic plays should conform to the ‘unities’ (of time, place, and action). And it possibly explained that tragedy revolves around a dramatic series of reversals (peripeteia) and recognitions (anagnorisis). All of this was almost certainly illustrated with reference to Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, in which the ruler of Thebes comes to acknowledge his own culpability in murdering his father and marrying his mother, before being gorily punished with self-inflicted blindness. A lot of this is so familiar to theatre students worldwide that it has become unconscious, tacit knowledge. It is taken for granted that this lecture is both true, and useful to the actor-in-training.

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What follows is an invitation to think a little more critically about these received ideas, and their impact on contemporary approaches towards the performance of ancient tragedy. This chapter aims to distinguish between the contents of the Poetics, and the centuries of interpretation which have accreted around the text. It will argue that locating Aristotle more precisely within his own time, and within the historical performance culture he may have known, can help the actor today to better understand why he makes the judgements he does, and (on this basis) to decide whether, and in what ways, such judgements might contribute to present-day understandings and interpretations of tragic plays. Let’s start with one of the big problems. Many acting students waste a lot of time trying to force every ancient tragedy they encounter to fit into the Aristotelian template outlined above. However, the simple fact is that not all extant tragedies fit this mould. Some tragedies have happy endings. Some explore the dreadful sufferings of entirely blameless characters. Some embark upon epic journeys across the cities of Greece. It frequently comes as an unsettling shock to realize that classical tragedy could have a range of outcomes, ranging from the pitiful to the joyous. In the theatre of ancient Athens, which did not subscribe to modern genre categorizations, a tragedy was simply a serious play based on themes drawn from Hellenic (i.e. Greek) myth. There was no requirement for plays to end, in the manner of the tragic dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, with large swathes of the cast (or indeed, anybody) slain.2 In the Poetics, Aristotle compares different types of tragic plot, and praises those which he considers to be ‘the most tragic’ (1453a).3 But these are, in his view, only the most successful among a range of dramaturgical options.4 Aristotle did not think of himself as codifying a fixed set of ‘rules’ for tragic playwriting. And the writers of surviving Greek tragedies certainly did not create their works (as people often assume) with Aristotle’s prescriptions ringing in their ears. Indeed, they cannot have done so, since the works which constitute today’s tragic canon all date from the century before Aristotle’s birth. This points towards another major problem, which is that acting students (and their teachers or directors) sometimes imagine Aristotle to be a figure of timeless genius who somehow stands outside history. This has three major consequences. Firstly, it allows the mistaken idea that Aristotle wrote the ‘rules’ of tragedy to flourish unchallenged, resulting in much perplexity for students who want to explore beyond Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. (Is Euripides a ‘bad’ tragedian because his plays experiment with

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form and generic expectation? And what about a drama like Philoctetes, in which even Sophocles allows a serious play to have a happy ending?) Secondly, it means that contemporary performers can struggle to distinguish between the ideas of Aristotle himself, and those of later scholars and critics who have, in turn, analysed and interpreted the ancient critic’s writings. For instance, it was Italian authors engaged in promoting neoclassical (literally: ‘new classical’) aesthetics and values who—following the lead of the sixteenth-century scholar Lodovico Castelvetro—eventually tidied up Aristotle’s brief comments about the necessary coherence of tragic plotting into dogmatic pronouncements about ‘the three unities’. Nevertheless, these make their way into many an introductory lecture on Aristotle today. The choice to translate the term hamartia as ‘fatal flaw’ is similarly informed by later ideologies, notably early Christian writings in which the Greek word (in Aristotle’s time it simply meant an error, or a mistake) began to acquire connotations of sinfulness which often end up infusing modern readings of ancient Athens’ dramas (despite the fact that this was not a Christian city). All of this pseudo-Aristotelian baggage— material which is popularly believed to have originated with Aristotle, but which actually derives from later commentators—makes it much harder for the contemporary actor to accurately evaluate the relationship between the ancient philosopher and the theatre culture he was writing about in the Poetics. Finally, de-historicizing Aristotle and his ideas means that acting students today have a tendency to overlook the hundred-year gap between the ancient critic’s analysis of classical tragedy and the earlier historical moment at which those plays were first performed. The kinds of performance that Aristotle may have been familiar with were perhaps very different from the first productions of Sophocles’ tragic plays. Certainly, the political and cultural environment of Athens had altered dramatically during those years, resulting in very different attitudes towards theatrical ­performers, and the place of their art within the city-state. In the preface to the second edition of Theatre Histories (2010), the volume’s authors critique accounts of Greek theatre in the ‘idealizing mode’, which underplay the range of contexts out of which, and in response to, ancient drama emerged, and as a result, end up obscuring ‘the problems that ought to engage us’ (Zarrilli et  al., xxiv). Aristotle’s analysis of—and judgements about—Athens’ tragic plays are profoundly rooted in his own society, experiences, and politics, and consequently, one of the ‘problems that ought to engage us’ when reading the Poetics within an

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actor-training context is the fact that the types of theatrical performance which Aristotle himself may have encountered were perhaps quite different from the styles of presentation favoured in the previous century. As Page duBois argues: To read fifth-century tragedy, one of the most significant cultural artefacts of classical Athenian democracy, through Aristotle, a fourth-century philosopher from a distant city, is to make the river of time flow backward. (2002, 19)5

In order to make sense of this time gap, and its impact, we need to locate Aristotle’s critical writing within a theatre history which does not necessarily begin with the Poetics.6 This chapter highlights some of the ways in which uncritical and ahistorical deference to supposedly Aristotelian dictums can block acting students’ effective engagement with Greek tragedy as a living theatre practice, leading them to both mis-locate and underestimate the problems ancient tragic drama poses. It proposes that the perspective of the theatre historian, concerned with the relationships between play-texts, their performance and re-performance, and the ways in which these are informed by changing cultural contexts, can help establish a clearer sense of how the Poetics might be responding to the particular conditions of tragic performance in the fourth (rather than the fifth) century BCE. This re-reading of the Poetics will help to identify some key differences between the performance culture with which Aristotle may have been familiar, and the tragic theatrical rituals of the fifth century. This in turn may help to generate a more accurate sense of the ways in which reading Aristotle can support the work of the theatre artist today, and where de-historicized readings of the Poetics might actually be limiting the contemporary actor’s ability to respond creatively to the surviving texts of ancient tragedy.

2.1   Aristotle in Theatre History Ancient biography is always a tricky business, but let’s start with a rough summary of what we do know about Aristotle’s life and work. Aristotle was born around 384 BCE in Stagira, a city in northern Greece. He came from a well-educated family, who may have had influential connections at the royal court of Macedonia, an increasingly ambitious and belligerent local power (Annis, 239). When Aristotle was 17, he was sent

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south to Athens, where he first studied, and then began lecturing, at the school (known as the Academy) established by Plato, who was the period’s pre-­ eminent philosopher. In all, Aristotle’s association with the Academy lasted for around 20 years. However, after Plato’s death in 347 BCE, Aristotle left Athens. He travelled to several different cities, but most famously he is reported to have been invited by Philip of Macedon (ruler of a kingdom on the verge of dramatic transformation into a military empire and world power) to become tutor to his son Alexander, who would later, thanks to his extensive conquests, come to be known as The Great. Aristotle seems to have held this post until around the time Alexander ascended to his father’s throne, following Philip’s murder in 336 BCE. Then, Aristotle returned to Athens. This time, he set up his own school (the Lyceum), where he debated and lectured for more than a decade. However, when Alexander died in 323 BCE, the city of Athens experienced a wave of anti-Macedonian reaction (Wiles, 92–3). Fearing for his life, Aristotle fled the city and he died in Chalcis (on the island of Euboea) the following year. Aristotle was famed as a philosopher, which in the ancient world covered a wider range of pursuits than would be expected today. The Greek word is made up of philos (love) and sophia (wisdom), making a philosopher, literally, one who loves wisdom. An ancient philosopher was someone who made it his life’s business to seek wisdom, not in the specialist academic disciplines associated with modern universities, but across all branches of human knowledge. So, an ancient philosopher like Aristotle might explore not only logic and ethics, but also rhetoric, politics, law, mathematics, physics, and biology. Aristotle’s surviving writings cover all of these topics, and more (Wiles, 92). He was a tireless enquirer into the workings of the world, and the creatures and activities he observed within it. He excelled in many fields of study, especially the categorization and analysis of animals (Annis, 240–1). It follows, then, that Aristotle was not a specialist student of the arts in the way that would now be expected of a professional theatre scholar or dramatic critic. When, in the Poetics, Aristotle turns his attention to comparing and analysing the inner workings of poems and plays, he does so using the same approaches he applied to categorizing birds, beasts, and fish, placing each manifestation within a highly systematized intellectual schema. What are the common features that make an epic an epic, and a drama a drama? What are the different types of tragic plot? How do these relate to, and compare with, one another? The philosopher is then able to rank the different texts he

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e­ xamines according to how closely they fit with the essential characteristics he has identified for each type of creative ‘making’ (poiēsis). Historians don’t agree about exactly where the Poetics should be located within Aristotle’s biography. Aristotle’s sympathetic account of the work of the poet was almost certainly written in reaction to his teacher Plato, whose Republic had proposed that dramatic poets (among other creative artists) should be banished from the ideal city, so that their suspicious facility with falsehood, and their ability to excite undesirable emotions among the populace, could not threaten to destabilize the philosophical good order of the state (3.935c–936a). Current scholarship would tend to date the formal drafting of the Poetics to the period of Aristotle’s return to Athens, and the founding of the Lyceum. For example, Stephen Halliwell suggests that the Poetics contains some material drafted while the young Aristotle was working alongside Plato (perhaps in direct response to the older philosopher’s strong views on the negative effects of artistic illusion),7 but that the work was later expanded and revised to be used in Aristotle’s own teaching at the Lyceum towards the end of his life (1998, 330).8 This idea certainly makes sense in terms of the style of the Poetics, which seems to have been written as a series of notes (perhaps lecture notes), rather than as a complete work of polished prose.9 From the perspective of theatre history, what’s particularly interesting about this dating for the Poetics is that it comes very close to the threshold between what are known as the ‘Classical’ and the ‘Hellenistic’ ages. The former term is used to describe approximately two centuries (from around 510 to 323 BCE) of astonishing creativity, during which a cluster of small Greek city-states located around the Mediterranean and Aegean coastlines—Athens dominant among them—revolutionized ideas about politics, philosophy, and the arts, while successfully resisting military threats from the powerful Persian Empire to the east. This was the period when the city of Athens first established its radical democracy, and reinvented old ritual practices as state-sponsored theatrical performances.10 By contrast, the ‘Hellenistic’ age was an era of expansion, during which the cultural achievements of the Classical era were exported across territories from Greece to Afghanistan, to Egypt and beyond, where Greekspeaking cities were established by Alexander and his followers (Price, 309).11 These new settlements vigorously promoted Greek philosophy, letters, and theatre as markers of their cultural sophistication. In response, the scholarship and arts of Athens began to transform themselves in order to endorse the aristocratic and royal display demanded by a new

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Hellenistic elite.12 The Hellenistic period conventionally takes as its starting point the death of Alexander the Great (Aristotle’s former pupil) in 323 BCE, although some scholars have suggested slightly earlier or later dates.13 Whichever date is preferred, it’s important to notice that the final years of Aristotle’s life overlap with the cultural beginnings of the ‘Hellenistic’ age. Hellenistic theatre has received far less critical attention than its classical forerunner, probably because hardly any dramatic texts from this period survive. But papyrus fragments, epigraphic evidence, and references to theatrical performances and personalities in the works of ancient historians can help to build a picture of some of its most significant developments. In order to highlight possible links between Aristotle’s Poetics and the emergence of Hellenistic theatre practices, the following discussion will focus on three key themes: the rise of the canonical ‘classic’ text, the emergence of the professional ‘star’ actor, and the changing nature and role of the tragic chorus.

2.2   The Rise of the ‘Classic’ Text A key date in the changing status of Athenian tragedy was 386 BCE (a year or so before Aristotle’s birth), when the revival of classic plays, their re-staging overseen by actors, became an official part of the Great Dionysia.14 This was a moment when the idea of the ‘classic’ play formally became part of Athens’ performance culture (Easterling, 212–13). Until this point, tragedies in Athens had normally received only a single performance, often directed by the drama’s author, within the competitive context of the city’s dramatic festivals, so this development represented a significant alteration of established practice. Surviving inscriptions from didaskaliai (theatrical records) for the years 341 and 340 BCE confirm this new habit of kicking off dramatic competitions with revivals of an ‘old’ satyr play and an ‘old’ tragedy before any ‘new’ plays were presented (214–17). From this evidence, it is clear that the elevation of selected tragic play-texts to ‘classic’ status had begun several years before the official beginning of the Hellenistic period. Another important date for understanding changing perceptions of tragedy in Athens is the year 330 BCE, when, according to the ancient text known as the Lives of the Ten Orators (sometimes attributed to Plutarch), the statesman Lycurgus ordered that the city should erect statues to the memory of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, that their plays should be formally recorded on

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papyrus scrolls, and then storied in the official archives (Kotlińska-Toma, 15).15 Play-texts from the previous century had evidently been circulating within the city for some time, but this official order for their preservation suggests an emerging sense of their value as literary artefacts, and as the basis for a new kind of theatrical performance, which would self-­consciously revisit what were judged to have been some of the greatest artworks of a former age. Johanna Hanink identifies such developments forming part of a deliberate political project which aimed to affirm the cultural achievements of (an increasingly anxious) Athens, asserting that ‘these years saw the “classical” tragedians and their plays packaged and advertised as the products and vital embodiments of the city’s idealised past’ (2014, 6). This growing emphasis upon preserving the texts of certain prestigious plays had its effect upon Aristotle’s own thinking about theatre. In the Poetics, the philosopher is primarily writing about the writing of tragedies, in a study which practically depends upon the availability of a range of play-texts, both contemporary and ‘classic’, which can be read and re-­ read, analysed, and compared.16 Aristotle’s preference for the works of ‘classic’ playwrights (especially Sophocles and Euripides) can be interpreted as emerging out of—and reflecting—a distinctly Hellenistic sensitivity to the prestige of old plays. As ‘classic’ texts, however, such plays could, for the first time, be read in isolation from their theatrical roots, in a comparative analysis which privileges literary aspects of the playwright’s craft. From this context emerges one of the major paradoxes of the Poetics: that a treatise which begins by identifying the mimetic arts as representing ‘the actions of people’, and drama as a form in which ‘all the personages play their parts as active agents’ (1448a), ultimately develops into a study of different plays’ plotlines, considered in isolation from their effects in enacted live performance. Although Aristotle does state that ‘a necessary part of tragedy must be the presentation on stage of the performance’ (1449b), the Poetics also contains the earliest known version of the argument that plays can be enjoyed without actors: ‘The power of tragedy can be exercised without actors and without a performance’ (1450b).17 This argument recurs at the close of Aristotle’s analysis too, in an attempt to defend tragedy from charges of being (in comparison to the less visually spectacular performance of epic) ‘vulgar’. The ‘quality’ of a successful tragedy, he argues, ‘is apparent from a mere reading’ (1462a). Aristotle focuses on tragedies as texts to be read and studied, an emphasis not matched by any equally detailed exploration of the practical business

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of staging and performing tragic drama. Frustratingly, for modern theatre-­ makers, Aristotle has relatively little to say about the impact of plays in performance. ‘Staging’, he asserts, ‘belongs more to the scene painter’s art than to that of the poets’ (1450b). At this point, thinking of the ocean of blood-coloured cloth spilling across Agamemnon’s threshold in the first part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia,18 or of Euripides’ Medea triumphantly, terribly revealed after the murder of her sons,19 it’s easy for the modern theatre practitioner to become impatient with Aristotle’s apparent blindness to the visual richness of tragic dramaturgy, and his obvious preference for words on the page over actors on the stage. Aristotle’s reading of tragedy has exerted a powerful influence over later studies of drama and theatre. As Gary Jay Williams observes in Theatre Histories: ‘Aristotle had set the western pattern of privileging the play-text and the author in his Poetics’, meaning that, for the philosopher’s many followers, ‘theatrical production was seen as secondary, a kind of inferior supplement at best’. For scholars taking their lead from Aristotle, tragedy ‘was first a literary form’ (Zarrilli et al., 513). Halliwell notes the irony that while Plato’s explicit hostility to theatre and its creators ‘encompasses a strong sense of the importance of public performance’ in his philosophical arguments, Aristotle’s appreciation of the literary values of dramatic texts ‘seems to sanction a clear separation of the playwright’s art as such from its embodiment in the theatre’ (1998, 337).20 Plato (this argument goes) may have hated and feared theatre performers, but at least he took them seriously. Aristotle, by contrast, in elevating playwright’s texts to respectable, literary status, effectively banished actors and their art from his intellectual discussion of tragedy. Despite the fact that the tragic playwrights of the fifth century BCE were frequently the directors of their own works, as well as sometimes appearing as actors within them,21 Aristotle’s Poetics considers the dramatic poet to be engaged in making a self-sufficient written text. In many ways, Aristotle might be conceptualized as a ‘proto-­Hellenistic’ figure, his prejudices and judgements anticipating ways of thinking about theatre which would become widely accepted in the decades following his death, but which represented a significant shift from earlier ideas about how theatre worked, and the roles of both playwright and actor within it. Not only was Aristotle teaching in Athens during a period when the revival of interest in old plays, and the systematic collecting of old scripts, was beginning to make available a corpus of ‘texts’ for literary analysis—this was also a period during which the status and function of the actor was

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changing. Lycurgus’ statute of 330 BCE, concerning the official recording of ‘classic’ plays, additionally specified that once such texts had been formally collected, leading actors should be forbidden from performing texts of these plays which deviated from the official versions. It appears that this ruling was made in response to increasingly powerful star performers who had got into the habit of adapting the popular plays now being canonized as ‘classics’ in order to suit themselves—a context which may help to explain Aristotle’s reluctance to engage seriously with the acting profession in the Poetics. On those few occasions when actors are specifically mentioned in the Poetics, it is primarily to allow the philosopher to admonish their excesses, and failures of taste and decorum. Aristotle assumes the time-honoured position that modern actors are less dignified than their forerunners, a debasement particularly evident in their overdone gestures: ‘Actors believe that the audience is incapable of understanding anything unless they emphasize it, and so they go in for exaggerated motions’, he complains (1462a).22 The changing dynamics of the proto-Hellenistic theatre of Aristotle’s final years in Athens offered the critic the means of exploring a wide range of dramatic texts, but the emerging ‘classic’ status of some of these perhaps co-existed uncomfortably with the actions of contemporary actors, who (circumstantial evidence suggests) were pragmatically cutting, re-arranging, and re-writing scripts to suit their own creative and commercial purposes.23 Perhaps in consequence of what may have seemed like cultural vandalism to the text-focused Aristotle, the Poetics offers very little encouragement to the would-be performer of Greek tragedy (especially by contrast with the meticulous attention the philosopher pays to persuasive public speech in his text Rhetoric). As Gregory Sifakis, having sifted the work for helpful material in his chapter ‘Looking for the Actor’s Art in Aristotle’ (2002), concludes: Aristotle ‘did not attempt to write systematically about acting’ (148), and ‘his idea of acting was that a performer should stay close to the text and avoid excess or imposing his own subtext upon the play’ (164)—hardly the kinds of practical insights the contemporary actor-in-training might have been hoping to unearth from a canonical work of dramatic criticism.

2.3   The Hellenistic ‘Star’ Actor The rise of the ‘star’ actor may have further implications for the particular arguments about tragedy that Aristotle makes in the Poetics. In the fifth century BCE, performance at the dramatic festivals of Athens seems

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to have been a predominantly amateur affair. In a city where the radical innovation of democracy meant that ordinary male citizens had both the right and the duty to attend the Assembly, to vote on legislation and foreign policy, to play an active role in the city’s busy law courts, and to form part of Athens’ military defence force, participation in theatrical performances might be thought of in comparable terms as a form of service to the polis (city-state). However, moving into the fourth century BCE, as the democratic institutions of the city were watered down, or lost altogether, the convention that tragic actors should be amateurs also seems to have weakened. Instead, as Athenian drama became a successful cultural export,24 ambitious, high-achieving actors could expect to enjoy both a significant degree of fame, and a range of lucrative professional engagements across the Greek-speaking world. Famous actors might be invited to perform for rich private patrons, or to use their public-speaking skills in a range of professional contexts (Easterling, 207). Actors might even become superstars, rivalling the most skilled musicians or athletes in fame. By Aristotle’s day, being a leading actor of tragedy was no longer a civic duty, but potentially the beginning of a financially rewarding professional career. However, such mobile (and upwardly mobile) acting practitioners were not willing to limit themselves to working within the constraints of Athens’ old-fashioned theatrical institutions. In her analysis of the records of Athenian dramatic contests for the years 341–340 BCE, Patricia Easterling observes that although three performers (named as Thettalus, Neopto­ lemus, and Athenodorus) competed for the individual acting prize (a new innovation, itself indicative of the increasing status and importance of ‘star’ actors) in the former year, only two names are listed in the latter (214–15). She speculates that the absence of a third actor in 340 BCE may have been due to the fact that he ‘had broken his contract in favour of a better offer from elsewhere’ (216). This habit seems to have become common in the fourth century, to the extent that cities began to impose fines upon actors who failed to meet their contractual obligations, a practice which ‘would not have been needed if there had not been serious competition between festival organisers and patrons in different places’ (216). Such competition for star actors’ time during Aristotle’s lifetime is further evidenced by an anecdote from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, which tells of an actor petitioning Alexander the Great to help him escape the financial consequences of having double-booked himself, and having been caught out by the unhappy Athenians:

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[…] when Athenodorus, who had been fined by the Athenians for not keeping his engagement in the dramatic contest of their Dionysiac festival, asked the king to write a letter to them in his behalf, though he would not do this, he sent them the amount of the fine from his own purse. (29.5)25

In the fourth century BCE, tragic acting was disentangling itself from the religious and civic rituals out of which it had initially emerged, and  was becoming an internationally sought-after, commercialized commodity. Of course, the emergence of professional acting during this period had significant consequences for the types of performance which could be presented. The custom of staging four plays (a tetralogy) back-to-back, each with a highly trained singing and dancing chorus, had always been a costly undertaking. Full-scale productions of tragedy were so expensive that during the fifth century BCE, they had been funded by a special tax, levied only upon the richest of the city’s citizens. But in the changing world of the fourth century, a solo performer with a portable repertoire of dramatic speeches could profitably ply his trade independently across the (expanding) Greek-speaking world, and so many star actors began to perform radically stripped-down versions of ‘classic’ works of tragedy, which could be presented on a range of occasions, and not only within the context of Athens’ dramatic festivals. The rise of such solo renditions of tragic dramas during the fourth century may also have had an impact upon the Poetics. Throughout, Aristotle argues that plot—and not character—is the most important element in constructing a drama: Now tragedy is the representation of an action, and action involves agents who will necessarily have certain qualities of both character and intellect […] it is because of their actions that they succeed or fail in life. (1449b–1450a)

According to Wiles’ (2007) analysis of this passage, Aristotle’s conception of character ‘emerges exclusively from the choices people make in the situation set up by the play’ (96). Taking Sophocles’ Antigone as an example, he adds that: ‘It was the moral choices made by Creon and Antigone in the course of the action of the play, and those choices alone, which ­according to Aristotle shaped the audience’s perception of character’ (97). However, the ancient philosopher’s focus on a protagonist’s ‘change of fortune’ (1452a), which he considers key to creating an emotional

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response among a tragedy’s audience, also led to him developing readings of tragic plots which are noticeably skewed towards precisely the same ‘star’ roles that were attracting the attention of the ambitious actors of the new century. In Aristotle’s reading of one of his favourite plays, for instance, it is ‘the story of Oedipus’ which evokes feelings of dread and pity (1453a). Aristotle fails to observe that the consequences of Oedipus’ errors fall as heavily on the ordinary people of Thebes, plague-racked and torn between conflicting loyalties, as they do upon the city’s unfortunate royal family. For Aristotle, the focus of a tragedy is always the plight of an exceptional individual, the author (and frequently the victim) of their own independent actions. Comparably, his summary of the story dramatized by Euripides as Iphigenia in Tauris reads: A girl has been sacrificed and then vanishes without trace. Unbeknownst to her sacrificers she is set down in another country where it is the custom to sacrifice strangers to the local goddess. She becomes the priestess of this rite. Much later, her brother happens to arrive, and on arrival is taken prisoner. (His being sent by an oracle, and for what purpose, does not belong to the story.) On the point of being sacrificed, he discloses his identity […] and so he is saved. (1455b)

Such a summary, with its introduction of Iphigenia as ‘a girl’ and Orestes as ‘her brother’, deliberately disassociates these characters from both their mythic and metatheatrical contexts. A reader would never guess, from Aristotle’s account, how knowingly Euripides’ plot draws on and responds to pre-existing accounts of this aristocratic family’s troubled history, or how the siblings’ duplicitous deeds are informed by the express desires of the Olympian gods. It is the experiences and acts of a few extraordinary characters, conceptualized as ‘morally autonomous individuals’ (Wiles, 103), and divorced from their wider contexts, that are emphasized. From the point of view of the modern rehearsal room, this can result in misleadingly narrow readings of dramatic narratives which contemporary scholarship would identify as being profoundly ‘dialogic’: that is, representing ‘conflicts over cultural issues that would have invited social, political and aesthetic debate’ (Zarilli et al, 58). Current readings of tragedies from the fifth century BCE emphasize the ways in which their challenging, sometimes open-ended moral complexities offered Athens’ democratic

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citizens a gruelling mental workout, problematizing the clash between the individualistic claims of the hero and the collective values of the community (Goldhill 2007, 47). But reading and writing decades after the city of Athens had abandoned many of its older democratic practices, this aspect of ancient drama doesn’t seem to have engaged Aristotle’s interest. Page duBois attributes the individualist bias of Aristotle’s accounts of tragedy to the philosopher’s own background and political allegiances. She argues that his readings of Athenian tragedy are ‘antidemocratic’ (2008, 131), highlighting the fact that although he lived in the city for many years, the philosopher (the son of a relatively privileged family, who enjoyed close personal contact with the most charismatic and militarily successful monarch of the age) always remained a public critic of Athens’ democratic tendencies. Hanink similarly labels Aristotle’s account of tragedy ‘remarkably non-Athenian’ (2014, 194) and ‘strikingly apolitical’ (215).26 Aristotle’s assumption that a tragedy centres upon ‘the great man or woman’ (128) betrays his distaste for, and cultural distance from, the dialogic function which modern critics frequently attribute to the tragic dramas of the fifth century, when (in Goldhill’s influential description) ‘a whole series of notions which are important to the city and the development of civic ideology’ were ‘put through a profound questioning’ (1986, 77). Aristotle’s individualist readings of tragedy have been connected to his personal antidemocratic beliefs, but could it be that the ancient critic’s views of the ‘classic’ plays he wrote about in the Poetics were also influenced by the new performance styles of the fourth century BCE? Did Aristotle ever witness tragedies staged in the old way, or was he attending performances of plays which had been ruthlessly pared down to a handful of highly dramatic scenes and roles to suit the business models of a new professional acting elite? It’s tempting to at least speculate that his intense, emotive focus on a few tragic characters may in part be the consequence of witnessing just such ‘proto-Hellenistic’ performances, in which emerging star actors had cut down pre-existing play-texts in order to showcase their own solo talents. As Edith Hall observes, Aristotle’s reading of Athenian tragedy prefigures ‘the incipient and future status of tragedy as an international art-form’. However, this change depended upon tragic performers’ ability to separate their professional working lives from the theatrical practices of the democratic city. In Hall’s phrase, tragedy ‘was about to lodge a petition for divorce from the Athenian democratic polis’, and the Poetics ‘enacts this divorce in the level of ­theory’

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(1996, 305).27 Often, it feels as though Aristotle’s analysis of tragic plots has more to do with the star-centred practices of an emerging Hellenistic theatre culture than with the chorus-based dramaturgies of the previous century.

2.4   The Changing Role of the Chorus One of the most exasperating things about the Poetics, for the contemporary actor (and for their teacher), is its comments on the subject of the chorus. From a modern point of view, the chorus is both the most distinctive and the most challenging aspect of Greek tragedy in performance, so it can be hard to understand how Aristotle can almost entirely omit it from his discussion. This is the bulk of what he has to say on the subject: The chorus should be treated as one of the actors; it should be part of the whole and should take part in the action. Sophocles, not Euripides, should be the model here. With other poets the songs have no more to do with the story than with any other tragedy. That is why they sing interludes—a practice commenced by Agathon. But what difference is there between singing interludes and transferring a speech or an episode from one play into another? (1456a).

Given contemporary theatre-makers’ almost comprehensive ignorance about the practicalities of choral performance in the fifth century  BCE, this is immensely frustrating. The ancient chorus sang and danced, but no scrap of the music they danced to has survived, and nor has any reliable information about their choreographies. There is no record of how a chorus may have interacted spatially with the leading characters of tragedy. And reading the Poetics provides no insight into any of these matters. But here again, locating Aristotle within a wider cultural shift towards Hellenistic theatre practices might at least help to account for the limitations of the Poetics’ discussion.28 Aristotle states that Sophocles should be taken as the model for the  composition of choruses, rather than Euripides, who was criticized during his own lifetime for producing choruses which were more like self-­ contained songs than interactions with or reflections upon the tragic events being enacted onstage.29 Aristotle’s reference to Agathon, however, highlights the fact that it was Euripides’ approach which being was emulated towards the end of the fifth century BCE, when stand-alone ‘interludes’ (embolima) began to be sung in place of dramatically integrated

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choral odes. This process of detaching the chorus from a tragedy’s central narrative continued into the fourth century, encouraged by ‘star’ actors and their desire to tour cut-down versions of tragic dramas across the Greek-speaking world. As Kotlińska-Toma observes, surviving sources indicate a mixed picture during the Hellenistic period: Epigraphic sources indicate that troupes of artists performing at festivals did sometimes include tragic choruses, though not always […] there were situations in which for practical reasons (e.g. financial constraints and/or a limited number of performers) tragedies were performed in an abridged version without the choral sections. (5)

She also explains that the papyrus fragments of some fourth-century performance texts include the marginal annotation XOPOY (CHORUS), signifying the places where choral songs might be inserted, as and when (and if) desired (37). She suggests that choral songs addressing broadly tragic themes (fortune, virtuous behaviour, the power of the gods) might have been slotted into plays in an ad hoc way (37), perhaps allowing a range of local groups to support the star performances of touring professional actors. On the basis of this fragmentary evidence, it appears that the chorus’ gradual separation from the dramas within which they performed their songs, a process reportedly initiated by Euripides and developed by Agathon, but enthusiastically adopted by many other play-makers, intensified during the fourth century. As has been established, the ‘star’ actors of the period had no compunction about altering ‘classic’ plays to meet their own needs, a process which could extend to the total excision of the chorus. And even where they were still performing within the increasingly old-fashioned constraints of the Athenian dramatic festivals, internationally famous actors might not be available to rehearse with their choruses for the extended time periods required for fully integrated performance. In addition, it seems that changing performance spaces meant that more and more often, star actors were divided from choruses by raised stages (Kotlińska-Toma, 5–6), further limiting the degree to which the two might interact in the course of a drama.30 So, while Aristotle might praise the ways in which Sophocles wrote his choruses, making them an essential part of the unfolding tragic drama, how confident can the present-day actor feel that the fourth-­century philosopher had actually witnessed performances involving a fully integrated tragic chorus? The answer may be: not very. And the modern theatre student seeking

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practical tips on the difficult business of training and performing tragic choruses will find very slim pickings among the pages of the Poetics.

2.5   Aristotle in Actor Training In many ways, the nascent Hellenistic theatre that Aristotle may have known is familiar to a contemporary theatregoer in London or New York: big-budget revivals of classic tragic dramas, sold on the star power, glamour, and individual talent of internationally famous actors, offering high octane emotional performances, with the chorus, an awkward and outmoded relic of an earlier age, dwindling in importance, and sometimes being omitted altogether. This is a kind of Greek tragedy which can be recognized as operating successfully (and often profitably) in the modern world. However, this isn’t the Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE. And it equally certainly isn’t the kind of ‘Greek tragedy’ evoked in university curricula and drama school prospectuses worldwide as offering a grounding in the principles of ensemble performance, vocal and physical fluency, and collective creative discipline. For example, the online description of MA Acting: Classical at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London) states that during students’ first intensive module: ‘the ensemble principle is nurtured through practical work on the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy’.31 This is entirely in keeping with the thinking of Elsie Fogerty, who in 1906 founded what was then called the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, and for whom choral training was a central component of rigorous preparation for a career on the stage. Simon Shepherd reports that Fogerty ‘believed in a standardized technique that was larger than, and went beyond, the individual’ (11). He continues: ‘Her training turned individual students into a group, and as a group they discovered something not available to individuals, the energy of the group as entity.’ (12). This kind of pedagogical heritage persists in many actor-training courses today, with the collective performance practices of Athens in the fifth century BCE still functioning as an ideal benchmark for the kinds of disciplined ensemble performance taken to be central to the acting of classical plays. Yet, at the same time, such courses almost universally cite Aristotle as a key critical influence (the course outline cited above promises accompanying seminars on ‘Aristotelian theory of tragedy’), overlooking the fact that the theatre the ancient critic actually knew was one in which such an ‘ensemble principle’ was rapidly giving way to tragedy as a vehicle for the

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individual star actor. In fact, there’s a profound mismatch between those aspects of Athenian tragedy (particularly the disciplines of chorus/ensemble work) which are emphasized in modern actor training, and the kind of proto-Hellenistic tragic theatre which may have been familiar to Aristotle, and is likely to have informed his analysis in the Poetics. Contemporary scholarship in the fields of classics and classical reception tends to emphasize the political and cultural contexts of tragedy, and interactions between the theatre culture of fifth-century Athens and the city’s real-world struggles, aggressions, and anxieties. Helene Foley argues that similarly politicized perspectives can also be seen informing the work of modern theatre artists, who have come to value tragedy’s searching explorations of ‘irreconcilable social and ethical issues’, rather than the individualist struggles of the Aristotelian hero. She observes that this has resulted in ancient tragedy on contemporary stages becoming ‘an open-­ ended and evolving tragic confrontation with communal problems that require responsible reactions regardless of their unmanageability’ (139). According to this view, present-day explorations and applications of classical tragedy go beyond the emotive, individualist narratives to be found in Aristotle’s readings of Sophocles and Euripides, as both artists and scholars increasingly elect to explore a broader, more politically engaged understanding of the nature and function of tragedy. As a result, Greek tragedy has been used to address a wide variety of crises and challenges in the contemporary world.32 And yet, Aristotle has held onto his authoritative position within actor training. In fact, to many students, de-contextualized snippets of so-called Aristotelian analysis have come to assume an almost sacred quality. Aristotle is an infallible, unassailable figure, standing outside history and beyond criticism, seeming to guarantee the timeless value and high moral seriousness of dramatic art. Aristotle’s name on curricula and in prospectuses lends an air of scholarly authority to a whole range of institutions and classes.33 But such unexamined beliefs can seriously hamper students’ ability to engage in-depth with ancient tragic texts, appearing to endorse emotive identification with the inevitable sufferings of a few isolated protagonists, rather than more challenging explorations of the kinds of unresolved or collective struggles which Foley identifies as crucial to tragedy’s meaning on contemporary stages. Further, the ancient philosopher’s unchallenged status informs a drama school curriculum which almost universally selects plays that seem to fit Aristotelian standards for study, resulting in a disproportionate emphasis

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on plays like Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone,34 while many of Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ surviving dramas are ignored. So, another consequence of widespread reverence for Aristotelian theorizing is to narrow the already limited canon of ancient tragedies to a handful of plays which are assumed to demonstrate the ‘correct’ deployment of the Poetics’ dictums. This habit can damagingly dislocate students’ experiences within actor training from the significantly more challenging repertoire of tragic plays found in professional production today.35 It also risks disempowering acting students, who are taught (or who quietly infer) that the interpretation of plays is someone else’s business, a matter of inherited tradition, and that a tragic play’s meaning is singular, fixed, and non-negotiable.36 Therefore, it’s vital to establish a clearer sense of the value, and the limitations, of Aristotle’s Poetics within contemporary actor training. And—as this chapter has proposed—locating the ancient philosopher more explicitly within theatre history is one potentially useful way of doing this. As Jonathan Chambers, arguing for the value of historical thinking in the context of actor training, suggests: […] infusing the acting studio with historical thinking involves encouraging students to view themselves as subjects and agents in the world who have made, and will continue to make, history. (39)

Re-positioning Aristotle as a belated and non-neutral reader of Athenian tragic plays does not solve all the difficulties associated with the contemporary actor’s explorations of Greek tragedy, but it does potentially do away with some significant blocks to an open-minded encounter, and it does help to reclaim the importance and value of the student’s own creative engagement with challenging texts and practices. Historicizing Aristotle, as a figure belonging to a particular time and place, familiar with a particular theatre culture, exposed to a specific range of performance practices (and, inevitably, not to others) can help to challenge some of the entrenched pieties which still inform actor-training programmes. Re-positioning Aristotle as a proto-Hellenistic commentator can potentially allow both teachers and students of theatre to make clearer (and less reverential) judgements concerning the usefulness and the limitations of the Poetics in the teaching of fifth-century tragic texts and practices. Challenging inherited assumptions that classical tragedy is a highly literary form, exclusively concerned with predictable, formulaic

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catastrophes afflicting a few exceptional personalities, can help both students and teachers to open up a space within actor training to rediscover the flexibility and playfulness of the genre, to reinstate tension and surprise within supposedly ‘known’ tragic narratives, and to root all of this in the multi-modal dramatic interplay between a play’s protagonist(s) and its chorus.

2.6   Aristotle and Stanislavski There is one passage in the Poetics which looks, tantalizingly, as though it might be about to provide the elusive clues to unlocking an Aristotelian model for acting. This is what Aristotle writes: People of the same temperament are more persuasive if they actually feel the emotions they enact: someone actually in distress best acts out distress, someone really angry best acts out rage. (1455a)

At first glance it appears that the philosopher might be advising the actor to adopt some early variant upon modern psychological (or even ‘Method’) acting. On closer reading, however, it becomes clear that Aristotle’s focus at this moment is not the performer of tragedy at all, but rather the imaginative process of its writer: ‘the poet should act the story as he writes it’ is his argument (1455a).37 That said, this short passage does provide a fascinating basis from which to speculate about the principles of acting which the ancient philosopher might have offered, had he not been determined to write the performer out of his analysis of theatrical poetry. Would Aristotle’s enthusiasm for the playwright’s art have led him to stress the need for an actor to faithfully serve the textual nuance of a drama? Might his tendency to emphasize the intellectual and ethical choices made by each autonomous figure, rather than their mythic, metatheatrical, and/ or political contexts, have drawn him towards a style of acting which highlights the links between an individual character’s psychological make-up and their dramatic actions? Might he, in fact, have given the world an acting treatise which—in some critical ways—prefigured the psychologically informed performance styles which arose around the turn of the twentieth century? Of course, barring the discovery of an as-yet-unknown book of the Poetics, dealing with the ancient actor’s art,38 this remains speculation. But certainly, the position of undisputed honour accorded to Aristotle by

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many theatre courses and drama schools today implicitly lends authority to later acting teachers whose views and methods echo the ancient philosopher’s focus upon textual interpretation, and the personal trajectories of tragedy’s individualized protagonists. Considered in these terms, Aristotle’s ambivalent legacy to the contemporary actor may extend significantly beyond the few half-remembered catchphrases many carry away from introductory lectures, a notion which will be probed further in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Unravelling the contested term catharsis is beyond the scope of the present discussion, but Wiles (99–100) offers a succinct introduction to the issue. 2. In the Poetics itself, Aristotle praises what seems to be Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris for the success of its dramatic reversal (1454a), which leads to a happy ending. 3. All quotes from Poetics in this chapter are from Kenny (2013). 4. Halliwell (1998, 19) focuses on Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BCE) as indicative of ‘some of the passions and liveliness’ of earlier, fifth-century debates about the purpose and value of playwriting. 5. Considering the scholarly field of archaeology, Michael Shanks observes a similar ‘confusion of primary and secondary sources’, noting that ‘most works used by ancient historians are only secondary sources which happen to be a little closer (chronologically and not necessarily conceptually) to what they write about’ (1996, 121). 6. See further duBois (2002 and 2008). 7. See further Wiles (93–4). 8. Though he adds that ‘Aristotelian chronology is a minefield from which the prudent keep their distance’ (1998, 324). For a detailed account of the textual evidence informing this conclusion, see Halliwell (1998, 337–45). 9. Kotlińska-Toma speculates that the text reproduced today might even be a compilation of class notes, which may have been in circulation among Aristotle’s pupils (15). On the fragmentary condition of some of the text of the Poetics, see Halliwell (1992, 411). 10. See further (for example) Cartledge (2007) and Hall (2007). 11. The word ‘Hellenistic’ is derived from Hellenes: a useful umbrella term which covered all the peoples who spoke Greek, and shared Greek cultural and religious values (even where they came from different city-states, with different rulers, laws, and customs). 12. For a discussion of Hellenistic culture after Alexander, see Lane Fox (2001).

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13. In her volume Hellenistic Tragedy (2015), Kotlińska-Toma adopts the performance of the drama Agen in 325 or 324 BCE as marking the beginning of this cultural phase (2). In Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy, Hanink opts for 322 BCE, the year in which Athens was conquered by Macedonian forces, as marking the start of Athenian Hellenism (2014, 221). 14. Hanink (2015) discusses possible reasons for this change in practice, arguing that it represented a deliberate attempt to evoke, and perhaps re-stage, some of the achievements of fifth-century Athens. 15. This ‘canon edition’ was afterwards ‘borrowed’ by Egyptian king Ptolemy III, and ended up in the Alexandrian library, thus playing a key role in the preservation of tragic texts (Kotlińska-Toma, 15). 16. Wiles (96) offers a vivid account of the very different terms in which the experience of tragedy is evoked in Aristophanes’ Frogs. 17. On Aristotle’s conceptual separation of artistic affect from an artwork’s makers/performers, see Hall (2017, 27–8). 18. Goldhill notes that ‘It would be foolish to maintain that the Oresteia, in particular, with the final procession of torch-bearers, the entrance of the Erinyes, the carpet scene, does not involve visual, dramatic action essential to the trilogy’s working’ (1986, 3). This theme will be revisited at greater length in Chap. 6. 19. Aristotle’s knowledge of this scene is evidenced in his critique of this sort of denouement (1454a). 20. Halliwell relates Aristotle’s unease with performance to the specific terms of his philosophical enquiry in the Poetics, stressing ‘Aristotle’s attempt to turn the poet into an artist who is the maker not of materials for the theatre (although he may be incidentally that in practice) but of poetic constructs, muthoi, the experience of which is cognitive and emotional, but not directly dependent on the senses, as it would have to be if drama could only be fully realised in acted performance.’ (1998, 343) He additionally suggests that this project of ‘separating drama from the context of public performance’ was part of Aristotle’s ‘attempt to restore a cognitive significance and respectability to poetry in the face of Plato’s criticisms’ (27). 21. Halliwell suggests that the fourth-century theatre’s lack of reliance upon ‘the guiding designs of the playwrights’, and ‘loosening of the bond between text and performance’ facilitated Aristotle’s own intellectual division of dramatic text from the public theatre (1998, 343). 22. Hamlet says something similar to the players at Elsinore, in a speech often taken to represent Shakespeare’s critique of the actors of his own day, so this is clearly not a charge uniquely levelled at the actors of Aristotle’s period. 23. In this, the actors of the fourth century BCE may, like the author-directoractors of the previous century, be compared with the contemporary figure of the multi-skilled ‘theatre-maker’ (Radosavljević, 2015).

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24. See further Clauss & Cuypers (2010, introduction). 25. See also Hanink, who comments that ‘To Athenodorus’ mind, Alexander’s festival had evidently constituted the better offer’ (2014, 20). 26. Hanink identifies such views as providing urgent impetus for the Lycurgan cultural project, which (by contrast) ‘set out to ensure that Athens and tragedy be forever linked’ (2014, 220). 27. See further Hall (2017, 40–1). 28. Wiles (103) additionally draws attention to the philosopher’s ‘materialist’ worldview, which may have meant that he found the religious overtones of much choral song and dance uncongenial. 29. Aeschylus, too, is credited with having ‘reduced the choral element’ (1449a), potentially suggesting that the (perceived) decline of the chorus had been going on for as long as anyone could remember. 30. On the changing architecture of The Theatre of Dionysus in the age of Lycurgus, see Hanink (2014, 92–100). 31. Available from: http://www.cssd.ac.uk/course/acting-classical-ma (viewed 5 February 2018). 32. See further Hall (2004). 33. On the marketing, and marketization, of actor training in the USA, see Tyler Renaud (2010). 34. Though, in practice (and as many students have discovered, to their puzzlement), the latter is actually quite difficult to square with the ‘tragic hero’ approach to interpretation. After all—who is the play’s flawed Aristotelian protagonist? 35. Goldhill identifies a renewed focus on staging the entire Oresteia trilogy, rather than just its first play, Agamemnon, as symbolic of ‘an increased recognition of the political nature of ancient tragedies’ among theatremakers and audiences (2008, 55). On the problems of reading the Oresteia via Aristotle, see Wiles (101–4). 36. This is the kind of interpretative passivity that Bertolt Brecht was reacting against when he labelled his own politically engaged theatrical experiments ‘non-aristotelian’ (Willetts 1964, 78). 37. A similar approach may have been familiar practice in Athenian theatre before Aristotle’s time. For example, in the comic play The Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BCE), Aristophanes presents a comic portrait of the (real-life) tragedian Agathon, ridiculously dressed up in women’s clothing to summon the necessary mood for writing tragic females. 38. Not entirely impossible. It is said, for example, that a lost text of Aristotle’s dealt with comic drama. See Wiles (104–5).

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References Annis, J. 2001 [1986], ‘Classical Greek Philosophy’, in J. Boardman, J. Griffin & O.  Murray (eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 228–47. Cartledge, P. 2007, ‘“Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life’, in P.E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3–35. Chambers, J. 2010, ‘Actor Training Meets Historical Thinking’, in E. Margolis & L.  Tyler Renaud (eds), The Politics of American Actor Training, Routledge, New York, pp. 31–45. Clauss, J.J. & Cuypers, M. (eds). 2010, A Companion to Hellenistic Literature, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. duBois, P. 2002, ‘Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis’, Theatre Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 19–24. duBois, P. 2008, ‘Toppling the Tragic Hero: Polyphony in the Tragic City’, in R.  Felski (ed.), Rethinking Tragedy, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 127–47. Easterling, P.E. 2007, ‘From Repertoire to Canon’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 211–27. Foley, H. 2010, ‘Generic Ambiguity in Modern Productions and New Versions of Greek Tragedy’, in E. Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 137–52. Goldhill, S. 1986, Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Goldhill, S. 2008, ‘Generalizing About Tragedy’, in R. Felski (ed.), Rethinking Tragedy, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 45–65. Hanink, J. 2014, Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hanink, J. 2015, ‘Why 386 BC? Lost Empire, Old Tragedy and Reperformance in the Era of the Corinthian War’, Trends in Classics, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 277–96. Hall, E. 1996, ‘Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?’, in M.S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 295–309. Hall, E. 2004, ‘Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth Century?’, in E. Hall, F. Macintosh & A. Wrigley (eds), Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 1–46. Hall, E. 2007, ‘The Sociology of Greek Tragedy’, in P.E.  Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 93–126.

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Hall, E. 2017, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Katharsis in its Historical and Social Contexts’, in E. Fischer-Lichte & B. Wihstutz (eds), Transformative Aesthetics, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 26–47. Halliwell, S. 1992, ‘The Poetics and Its Interpreters’, in A.O. Rorty (ed.), Essays in Aristotle’s Poetics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 409–24. Halliwell, S. 1998, Aristotle’s Poetics (Revised Edition), University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kenny, A. 2013, Aristotle: Poetics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kotlinska-Toma, A. 2015, Hellenistic Tragedy: Texts, Translations and a Critical Survey, Bloomsbury, London. Lane Fox, R. 2001 [1986], ‘Hellenistic Culture and Literature’, in J. Boardman, J. Griffin & O. Murray (eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 332–58. Price, S. 2001 [1986], ‘The History of the Hellenistic Period’, in J. Boardman, J. Griffin & O. Murray (eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 309–31. Radosavljević, D. 2015, ‘10 Traits of Theatre-Making in the 21st Century’, Exeunt Magazine, viewed 8 January 2018, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/ ten-traits-of-theatre-making-in-the-21st-century/. Shanks, M. 1996, Classical Archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the Discipline, Routledge, London. Sifakis, G.M. 2002, ‘Looking for the Actor’s Art in Aristotle’, in P. Easterling & E.  Hall (eds), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 148–64. Tyler Renaud, L. 2010, ‘Training Actors or Consumers?’, in E.  Margolis & L.  Tyler Renaud (eds), The Politics of American Actor Training, Routledge, New York, pp. 76–93. Wiles, D. 2007, ‘Aristotle’s Poetics and Ancient Dramatic Theory’, in J.M. Walton & M.  McDonald (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 92–107. Willetts, J.  1964, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, Methuen, London. Zarrilli, P.B., McConachie, B., Williams, G.J. & Fisher Sorgenfrei, C. 2010, Theatre Histories (2nd Edition), Routledge, New York.

CHAPTER 3

The Stanislavski Legacy

The previous chapter discussed how Aristotle’s views, and their later reception, inform many actors’ perceptions of ancient Greek tragedy, understood as an essentially systematic and logical form of drama. Here, it is contended that these characteristic terms of Aristotelian analysis set the stage for later performers to interpret and analyse tragedy in ways which align neatly with Stanislavski’s early teaching experiments. This convergence of focus may help to explain what might be termed the ‘invisible juxtaposition’ of Stanislavski and Aristotle, a phenomenon which may be discerned across the various settings where Greek tragedy is taught, rehearsed, and performed. Though this connection is seldom made explicitly, the Poetics is often deployed as a prologue or foundation to Stanislavski’s system, providing a substructure of systematic textual analysis (however partial and flawed), which paves the way for the surviving texts of tragedy (among other ‘classical’ plays) to be interpreted as though they were modern, narratively consistent, and psychologically plausible dramatic works. As this chapter will propose, the recurring alignment of Aristotelian principles and Stanislavski-based practices also plays a major role in defining a sense of the ‘classical’ within contemporary actor-training communities. However, as will also be shown, this apparently logical combination of Aristotelian criticism and acting approaches derived mainly from Stanislavski’s early pedagogic experiments is based upon a partial (and distorting) understanding of the scope of Stanislavski’s career-long explorations. In particular, this merger of Aristotelian perspectives and Stanislavski’s © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_3

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practices tends to result in a text-based (logocentric) understanding of tragedy and its potentials, an outcome which runs counter to Stanislavski’s own intention of articulating the basis for a psychophysical acting process as a means to achieve a lived and spontaneous experience during performance. And this lopsided application of Stanislavski’s psychophysical system means that for the contemporary actor, living the experience of tragedy’s various elements (including the genre’s song and dance, its supernatural interventions, and its choral presences) can become intensely problematic.

3.1   Stanislavski’s Legacy Actor, director, and trainer Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938) remains an important—if sometimes unacknowledged—influence upon contemporary rehearsal and acting processes. When, for instance, actors nod in agreement that a particular performance appears to be ‘truthful’, ‘real’, or ‘believable’, this behaviour draws on (either directly or by inference) Stanislavski’s legacy. Yet, no one study can hope to describe in full the groundwork and historical influence of this legacy. Critical and technical understanding of his acting system has evolved and changed over time, which has meant a process of accruing, discarding, revisiting, re-­translating, and re-testing his ideas and concepts, a process which continues to (and almost certainly beyond) the present day. Out of these different construals, Stanislavski may be perceived as a sum of many parts.1 There’s his practice as theatre director, actor, and manager of a repertory training school, the Moscow Art Theatre; in this role, he was a leading interpreter of contemporary Russian and European dramas—not just the realist plays with which he is predominantly associated. There is also Stanislavski’s lifelong development of a pedagogy, or what is currently accepted as his ‘system’, an apt term to describe the organizational network which ties together his own practical reflections, the recollections of his disciples and students, and present-day re-evaluations which have shed new light on the terminology he used and what this meant, especially in the context of the socio-political and cultural changes he lived through. Today, Stanislavski is also part of a post-Stanislavski discussion of the ­history of actor training and theories. This includes well-trodden studies of the relationship of the ‘system’ to other theoretical models developed by practitioners such as Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Meyerhold, as well as the later variants that arose in America’s studio acting culture. The latter

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particularly gave rise to an emphasis on psychological-inductive acting techniques, thereby contributing to the popular (and misguided) reception of Stanislavski’s teaching as a method for achieving emotionally invested, truthful acting. In addition, the recent ‘cognitive turn’ in performance studies,2 and current scholarly discourses on training, have both validated the holistic teachings of Stanislavski’s system (Blair 2006), and re-assessed its far-reaching influence (and inherent problems) in cultural and gender discourses (Pitches & Aquilina 2017; Malague 2012). If there is one unifying principle informing Stanislavski’s teaching, it is the notion that merging the real self and the fictive role occurs through two interrelated activities that involve psychological and physical approaches—or a psychophysical process. In the first, an actor is presumed to read and interpret a text, and this interpretive activity (as rigorously conducted as a lawyer preparing the facts and circumstances of their brief) generates thoughts, ideas, and choices when preparing to play a character role. The second involves creating a particular sequence of activities, or physical work, giving rise to observations and promptings which draw from the actor’s body a proportionate and complementary set of responses to the psychological activity. However, the early teaching of Stanislavski disproportionately emphasized the former, psychologizing set of activities. Rather than physical or improvisatory exercises (which came later in Stanislavski’s explorations), actors created performances prompted mainly by imagined and observed emotions, alongside psychoanalytical interrogations of play-texts, which shed credible psychological light on the realistically explicable desires and actions of individualized characters.

3.2   Stanislavski and Greek Tragedy Today, it’s not uncommon for the actor-in-training, informed (knowingly or not) by versions or spin-offs of Stanislavski’s system, to approach Greek tragedy as though its characters and stories can be represented in ­psychologically plausible terms, arrived at via a rehearsal process which draws on real-life feelings and observations. The modern-day actor may also find certain character archetypes easy to relate to. Blind seers, vengeful gods, and hard-done-by heroes and heroines are distinctively etched into the modern consciousness because they appear repeatedly across the arts, literature, and religion. In Anglo-European drama, ancient tragic figures may be engagingly cross-referenced with early modern tragic personages such as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, or Cordelia. In

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twentieth-­century drama, there are reincarnations of these tragic types in modern guises within the plays of (for example) Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill. Psychoanalytic theory may also persuade the actor that their deepest subconscious impulses are hardwired in Oedipal or Electra complexes. This is rich territory for the actor’s ego to get stuck into. Even if the mythic worlds of Greek tragedy seem far removed from modern sensibilities, the seemingly random injustices of the gods—or at least the excessive suffering they cause humans to endure—resonate with the unpredictable-ness of the contemporary world. Greek tragedy’s multiple afterlives across the arts have captured the zeitgeists and tropes of rapid globalization, the atrocities of terrorism, the inhumanity encountered by refugees, the complexities of climate change, the crises of a struggling democracy, and the post-human existentialities of living in  a high-tech world. It would seem logical, then, that actors should be able to draw on real-life experiences to access Greek tragedy. Who can blame the contemporary actor for wanting to get ‘real’ with Greek tragedy? Yet, the difficulties and obstacles are also very real. The creation of ‘truth’ through acting is a complex and highly subjective concept,3 whose proponents often conflate living ‘in the moment’ of a performance, with an intense emphasis on excavating their own emotional histories, and which may (even more problematically) require an authoritative figure in the room to validate such ‘truthful’ experience.4 And the project of creating ‘truthful’—that is, personalized and psychological—renderings of the distressed Iphigenia, the obstinate Oedipus, the vengeful Orestes, or the possessed celebrants of the Bacchae is problematic from the start if the actor presumes that these characters were imagined with a subconscious, and that the tragic language they speak (or sing) is rooted in complex psychological subtexts. A form of drama pitted with all kinds of improbable or inconsistent given circumstances presents significant challenges to an acting approach which seeks personal truth as the benchmark of a fulfilling performance. Let’s imagine a rehearsal room where three actors are working on three different tragic roles. Most actors training today will recognize, in each of these strategies for preparing a character role, a set of basic principles derived from aspects of Stanislavski’s teaching: • An actor is assigned the role of the prophetess Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, doubly blighted in life by the cruel ‘gift’ of prophecy (always accurate, but never believed) and by the Greek trade in war slaves, of which she has become a trophy victim. Her text consists of

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fiercely potent passages; three full-length monologues broken up by a series of symmetrical exchanges with the chorus. An actor working on this part has already conducted her research about the play. She is able to explain who Cassandra is, her background story, the dramatic situation, the probable time of day and setting, and  her character’s objective in this scene of public outpouring. The actor moreover  outlines how she’s been working on simulating appropriate emotions arising from her own experience; though she comes from a relatively privileged background, she relates the story of a cousin who knew a secret which she had to reveal to her own family. It is this memory of her cousin’s experience that she wants to tap into so she can give a ‘true to life’ performance. • An actor playing Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King insists that in ‘no way’ has he ever felt strong feelings for his mom, and that in fact he worships his dad (groans from his fellow actors). Consequently, there’s not much use in mining personal emotions for the role. Instead, he has ‘clocked’ the journey of Oedipus, noting where his character’s main objective—which is to hunt down the killer of Laius—starts to turn, and Oedipus becomes the man hunted. The actor mentally scores his actions; that is, he meticulously marks out in the plot how Oedipus progresses, step by step, to that point where he finds out it was he who killed his father and had children with his mother. He wants to ‘hit that climax’, as he puts it, ‘like a brick wall’. That the actor is an avid runner makes it easy for him to envisage and execute such a plan. As a possible supertask, he offers: ‘Oedipus is running from the truth and hitting it when he least expects it’. • An actor is excited about the possibilities of a cross-gendered interpretation of Dionysus, the god of transformation, in Euripides’ Bacchae. In her research, Dionysus, as depicted in arts and in literature, sports both male and female traits, and is the leader of the maenads (ecstatically possessed female followers). The actor eschews white, male, guru-hippy paradigms. Instead, she thinks more about the dynamics of fandom and the anarchic impulses of rock’n’roll. She looks at vintage icons—Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith— observing their performances, listening to their vocal styles, reading about their fan bases. The ordinarily straightlaced actor starts coming into rehearsals wearing a leather jacket, adopting a surly tone in her voice, and (worryingly) taking up smoking. She’s learning to ‘not be’ herself so she will ‘totally get into’ the nature of transformation.

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These actors do research on their characters, who they are, what given circumstances appertain to their scenes, and determine their objective(s) throughout the drama. Aligning the imagination of the real self with the fictive role, and working from the inner sense (psychological) to outward representation (physical), correlate with an actor’s primary objective which, according to Stanislavski, is to capture a ‘lived experience’ (or perezhivanie) during performance.5 But each of these actors has appropriated a variation of Stanislavski’s system, resulting in an imbalance in the application of psychophysical principles. The actor preparing for the role of Cassandra is using primarily affective memory (i.e. images or remembrances that arouse emotional feelings or moods), to imbue her role with appropriate feelings so that she might render a ‘truthful’ performance. The actor playing Oedipus applies a technique of scoring a logical line of actions while the image of ‘running into a wall’ utilizes the combined principles of imagination and feeling in Stanislavski’s teaching. Moreover, scoring actions presupposes, incorrectly in this  case, that these ‘actions’ are mainly thought through. The preparatory work of the third actor is similar in using observation, in this case of rock’n’roll icons, to help her ‘be’ Dionysus, exploring a mix of femaleness and maleness she discerns in those icons. However, the choices (and even lifestyle changes) made by these actors confuse Stanislavski’s notion of living the experience with a method—or ‘the Method’—which focuses primarily on personal stories, experiences, and memories to spark ‘truthful’ states of being. The Method was developed by Lee Strasberg, a disciple of Stanislavski who, like other emerging actor trainers, appropriated Stanislavski’s ideas, mostly through ‘oral tradition and live translation’ (Malague 17; Benedetti 2005, 147–8). But these approaches, being based mainly upon the early stages of a lifelong experimental process, diverged in some key ways from Stanislavski’s own ongoing explorations. In fact, Stanislavski’s system was never solely concerned with psychological approaches, and his practices developed via open-ended discussion and exploration of the complexities of enacting text. The three books most readily associated with his teaching, An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role, despite flaws in the translation and recollections from Russian to English,6 attest to the investigatory and adaptable qualities of his ongoing work. The system continuously evolved through practice, testing, and theorizing. And this happened broadly in three phases. It began initially with The First Studio work (1911/12). This phase emphasized sense-emotion memory and the scoring of character actions (with which the three actors discussed above are primarily

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concerned), eventually exercising a powerful influence over the American ‘studio’ approaches of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner. However, Stanislavski, through his own experience of failure in relation to these earlier approaches, started to question the real outcome of such emotionally invested practices, especially when (night after night) the habituation of such preparations failed to induce the lived feeling that he sought as an actor. He therefore developed, in a middle period (during the interwar years), a more physio-mechanical approach to the work of the actor, partly seeking to remedy the shortcomings of the first period, but also to align his practice with socio-political conditions which saw the rise of a Soviet worldview and its ideological aspirations towards an assembly line, mechanized society. This period developed physiological approaches which culminated in his ‘Method of Physical Action’ (1934–38). A final phase, enriched by Stanislavski’s readings and practice of yoga, sought a holistic sense, or ‘organic’ perception of emotions, improvisation, and text analysis (Krasner, 196–7). The psychophysical process is an overarching term for the holistic acting experience Stanislavski sought, a neologism that encapsulates how the inner workings of the mind (or sometimes ‘spirit’) and its manifestation in the outer workings of the body operate in creative combination to generate a lived experience onstage (see Roach 205).7 The psychophysical process depends upon the creative combination of analytical (psychological) and body-based (physical) work. It seeks to undo conventional dualities of mind and body, promoting instead the idea that an actor needs to work both from the outside in (where physical gestures or actions prompt psychological responses) and from the inside out (where psychological phenomena activate physical movements). But if physicality and spontaneity are meant to be utilized as much as (and in creative synergy with) psychology, why do so many actors of Greek tragedy continue to privilege mind over body, especially when contemporary training methods have, for some years, emphasized integrative and embodied approaches? Why should tragedy’s modern actors so often insist on perpetuating ‘logocentric’ approaches, that is, a belief that it is text and language that fundamentally conveys meaning and preconditions choices? And why does textual analysis continue to constitute the main activity within Stanislavski-inspired rehearsal and acting of tragedy, emphasizing analytical/conceptual preparation, rather than seeking a balance of analytical and physical/sense-based work from the outset? As outlined earlier, the degree to which the Method (rooted in and amplifying particular facets of

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Stanislavski’s early emotion-based work) is entrenched in the acting studio and industry offers one important part of the explanation. The persistence of patriarchal values in training and in the industry is also a factor, empowering and privileging the canonical script (and its authoritative interpreters) over somatic responses which may challenge or subvert its established logic (Malague, 22). But the logical, or ‘logocentric’ qualities of Stanislavski’s own system also correlates powerfully with the legacy of Aristotelian scholarship.8 In both, the faculty of the mind (in making logical connections concerning the order and cause of things) is prioritized over other modes of experience and insight, whether in analysing the text of the play, or in determining the stages of an actor’s process.

3.3   Mind, Body, and Tragedy For the actor in fifth-century Greek drama, it would have made very little sense to separate the mind that thinks from the body that acts. The ancient tragic actor would probably not have understood himself as an independent psychological being, as though a governing consciousness existed in the head, and the body served as a machine doing its bidding. According to Wiles, ‘the body, like the theatre itself, was a centred space’ (2000, 154), and it was according to this socio-cultural principle that dramatists such as Aeschylus could write a dramatic language which correlated the radius of the body with emotive powers (154).9 Yet, the claims of philosophy were increasingly challenging such positions. Plato’s system is premised on a belief in eternal and perfect forms, which the philosopher (on behalf of other, lesser humans) was best able to apprehend. Accordingly, the  philosophical mind is invested with the higher (and therefore more valued) creative force of reason, and such wisdom resided in the soul, a separate immaterial entity. By contrast, the seat of emotions was located in the perishable body, a body which ought to be subdued to the rational promptings of the mind. In ancient tragedy, emerging  notions of individual will and self-­ determination were manifested in the action of characters such as Euripides’ Medea (431 BCE), who chooses to commit infanticide on the basis of her intellectual reasoning (154), even though the act causes her emotional and bodily anguish. Another example occurs in Oedipus the King (c.429 BCE), when the play’s protagonist is beseeched by the chorus of elders to give his reasons for blinding himself:

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Chorus:  Doer of dreadful deeds, how did you dare       so far to do despite to your own eyes?      what spirit urged you to it? Oedipus: It was Apollo, friends, Apollo,       that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion.       But the hand that struck me      was none but my own.      (trans. Grene, 55)

Sophocles’ Oedipus claims for himself the power of independent thought, and a mind that wills decisive action, even as he acknowledges the gods’ ability to wreak havoc on human lives. But it’s important to remember that such moments in tragedy are irregular and atypical—a situation which complicates the work of the modern actor. Aristotelian analysis may demand tragic protagonists who can be understood and judged as ‘morally autonomous individuals’ (Wiles 2007, 103), but an ancient play like Euripides’ Heracles (c.416 BCE), in which the eponymous hero undertakes a rescue plot, only to be catastrophically maddened, midway, by divine intervention, is just one clear example how unproductive it can be to box Greek tragedy into a world of realist psychology (Riley, chapter 1).10 As Wiles observes: ‘In a world where multiple gods regularly operate through humans, it made no sense to think of actions being rooted in an autonomous ego’ (2000, 154). The human actor, in Greek tragedy, is a site where the competing claims of body and mind, and the limits of mortal reason and will, are constantly being tested and contested. Platonic dualism set in train an enduring debate in European theatre regarding the nature of acting: how can the actor as a mimetic performer— that is, as someone who uses craft or performance techniques to copy reality—also be personally immersed in (even possessed by) the emotion of a given dramatic role or moment?11 During the eighteenth century, philosophical investigations into the science of emotions, and the effect of emotions on the body and human behaviour, reinforced the neoplatonic idea that all existence and causes resulted from a single principle, which was defined and led by the activities of the mind. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) formally distinguished the mind from the body in the famous dictum, ‘I think therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum). Theories on how the actor ‘acted’—that is, how they created the illusion of feeling the emotions of a fictional role while maintaining a sense of their own real

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self—pivoted on the idea that the mind formulated and articulated meaning and understanding for the body. Denis Diderot (1713–84), in his influential essay Paradoxe sur le comédien (Paradox of the Actor, 1773), conceptualized the actor as simultaneously able to immerse themselves in the emotional world of a fictional character and yet maintain objective control. Diderot recognized the imaginary investment that comes from inner-personal resources, and the necessary combination of that imagination with other external sources to create the representation of art: ‘Memory retains the image; imagination revives it, vivifies it, and combines it with other images to form the living mosaic of the inner model’ (Roach, 143). Since then, historical debates on acting have wavered between processes an actor might use to  prepare for  a performance, and  how far they  might  ‘let go’ of the rehearsed actions  and rely on the moment of performance for inspired acting (Benedetti 2005, 81). Stanislavski aspired through his teaching and practice to give spontaneous moments in performance a measure of control, repeatability, and consistency, combining ‘truthfulness of behaviour’ with the demands of being seen and heard onstage (Benedetti 2005, 109). This was a response to the emotionally vacant, artificial, and mechanical acting techniques seen in much of nineteenth-century Russian theatre.12 Stanislavski’s reaction to the hack work of emotional mimicry resulted eventually in his pioneering work on psychophysical exercises. He distinguished between technical tricks in the use of the voice and movement, which appealed to the immediate adulation of audiences, and the true art of representation, which he believed couldn’t exist ‘without genuine creative experience’ drawn from skilful preparation (115–18).13 In pursuit of such aims, the holistic premise underlying Stanislavski’s psychophysical work encourages the actor to eschew dualism (the notion that the actor’s mind solely wills the emotions into life). He hoped to overcome this conceptual divide by exploring physical action, improvisation, and through (occasional) appeals to metaphysical or ‘spiritual’ essences in the actor (Gillet & Gutekunst, 7–8). And yet, the system’s insistence on the importance of analytical work—to ascertain a character’s tasks, objectives, through actions—effectively devolves much vital decision-­making and initial groundwork to the analytical mind, at the expense of the kinds of insight or inspiration that might arise from somatic explorations (Evans, 164–8). In this sense, Stanislavski’s system may also be understood as a site of unresolved contention between logocentric and psychophysical procedures. On the one hand, Stanislavski’s extended exploration and promotion of the value of psychophysical acting practices valorized

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the kinds of insight and knowledge which could arise from combined or integrated (simultaneously intellectual and embodied) explorations of a play or role. On the other, the cognitive principles upon which Stanislavski founded his experiments, and the rhetorical form in which his active explorations reached a reading public, tend in the opposite direction; in effect (if unintentionally) endorsing linear, intellectual reasoning, and authoritative formulations on analytic foundations of the art of acting.

3.4   Systematic Acting The objectivity (or quasi-scientific manner) with which Stanislavski documented the process and outcomes of his experiments in actor training may be compared to Aristotle’s systematic approach when he categorized and compared tragedy’s poetic texts. For the ancient philosopher, the analysis of proofs and principles only becomes useful knowledge when that knowledge can be demonstrated through the medium of logical argument (McKeon, 2–3). Aristotle’s writing in the Physics, for instance, evidences his lifelong fascination with the essence and behaviour of nature, and provides a general theoretical framework for a ‘variety of different topics, ranging from general issues like motion, causation, place and time, to systematic explorations and explanations of natural phenomena across different kinds of natural entities’.14 In the Posterior Analytics, he explains the reasoning process as the action of observing specific events, and then proposing a law upon which those events come about (inductive reasoning); or starting from a general rule and then proving whether the proposition is true or not, based on a set of specific evidence (deductive reasoning). In Poetics, a similar style of reasoning is applied to the elements of tragic drama which come under critical scrutiny. Here, Aristotle describes the inductive ascent to generality from particular instances, such as in his description of the whole and its parts in epic poetry (1459a–b), or deductive descent to particularity, as in his discussion of the source of tragic effects (1453–54). This form of systemic thinking attempts to articulate a logical process underpinning the creation of poetic language: the micro-­ level construction and sounding of the parts, such as the ‘phoneme, syllable, particle, noun, verb, conjunction, inflection, sentence’ (1656b), ought to produce, on the macro level of tragedy, affective poetry with a moral purpose.15 Both Aristotle and Stanislavski sought to inculcate, in the poet and the actor, respectively, habits of inquiry and action that proceed in a systematic and evidence-based manner. In classical scientific work, an

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investigation of natural phenomena is conducted using quantifiable ­methods to analyse data based on principles of reason. Stanislavski strove to test the phenomenon of acting through practical explorations, not just in his own work, but also through the actors he worked with at the Moscow Arts Theatre. This was an investigatory and analytical process, evidenced in his lifelong writing and notes, and resulted in an evolving pedagogy.16 In what ways did this investigatory and experimental work proceed in an objective, quasi-scientific way? Not only did Stanislavski conceive of the (psychological) mind and (physical) body working as an interconnected network,17 he also analysed dramatic action so that complex objectives or character actions could be deduced into basic units, or ‘beats’. Unlocking a character’s objectives proceeds from the principle that an author consciously constructed such objectives in the drama, and that a recoverable logic of intentional ‘beats’ is embedded in the formation of the text (Merlin 2007, 70–3). Stanislavski also suggested that for every character’s objective, there is a counter-objective, and that such opposing actions progress in a kind of chain reaction of events (73–90). This is comparable to the classical scientific principle (found in physics) that for every action of force, there is a sufficient natural counteraction. A similar idea underpins the notion of ‘scoring actions’, which is found in his Method of Physical Action. Within this formulation, Stanislavski proposed that characters follow dramatic through-lines of action, and that all such actions are driven by a super-objective (219–26). A scientific principle may be inferred in this formulation, such as an inertial force in physics, which is defined as a tendency of objects in space to sustain motion in a straight line. This linear sequence of actions also correlates, in Stanislavski’s thinking, with the metaphor of a ‘filmstrip’ (kinolenta), suggesting that Stanislavski wanted actors to maintain a stream of mental visualizations as they performed (Krasner, 227). Such principles privilege intelligent (mind-based) observations, a switched-on critical acumen that interprets and re-­ interprets the facts of a given plot. To summarize, Stanislavski, like Aristotle, construed the nature of human thought and activity in patterned and structured frameworks, and it is through observation and iteration in preparatory work that actors are meant to recreate and experience ‘real life’ on stage.18 Stanislavski’s pioneering pedagogy came about by testing and observing hunches and ideas from rehearsal to performance, in the same way that the experimental ethos in science labs creates the environment in which to test theories

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before they are applied to the real world.19 As a result, there is a perspectival sympathy between the two approaches, which permits Stanislavski’s teaching on acting practices (particularly his early, text-focused and analytic approaches) to be positioned as the logical successor to Aristotle’s formal critique of tragic playwriting. And this (often implicit) alignment of the two has important consequences for modern taxonomies of ‘the classical’, and the kinds of training considered appropriate for the ‘classical’ actor today.

3.5   Stanislavski and the Classical Historically, from a European and colonial perspective, an education in the classics meant an immersion in Greek and Latin languages and, since the Renaissance, the education of social and economic elites has been safeguarded and privileged through exclusive access to these. The learning experience of the classics was founded on recitation, composition, and the analysis of texts through a trivium of logic (dialectics), grammar (linguistics), and rhetoric (expression). By default, dramatic texts such as Greek tragedy were subject to the same analytical process, and appropriated as a genre of classical high art, a habit which persists today in many education systems. In the USA, for instance: ‘For better or for worse, “every schoolboy”—or girl—has at some time read a Sophoclean tragedy, usually Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone; from time to time the texts of Euripides and even Aeschylus are part of the regular curriculum’ (Hartigan, 4). Such is the intrinsic role that Greek drama has played in the American education system that reviewers for the elite New York Drama Desk are assumed to have a ‘basic knowledge of the play and the traditional method of presenting it’, evidencing that ‘their judgments are made from an educated point of view’ (4). In the UK, access to classical languages remains profoundly entangled in issues of social class, and extended study of ancient texts tends to be restricted to elite educational establishments, though many students can expect to encounter Greek tragedy or comedy in translation as part of their secondary or tertiary education. Given that Aristotle is a primary resource in a school or college teaching Greek drama, while Stanislavski provides  the foundation of most drama school and conservatoire training, it should come as no surprise that acting textbooks correlate, and sometimes conflate their theories. In Jean Benedetti’s Art of the Actor (2005), or Robert Blumenfeld’s Using the Stanislavsky System (2008), preparatory instructions regarding classical

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texts, drawing on concepts such as given circumstances of time and place, natural disposition of characters, and the logical sequence of plot actions, are conveyed with more than a passing nod to Aristotle’s pronouncements about Greek tragedy. In her brief description of the history of acting, Stanislavski expert Bella Merlin indicates how Aristotle’s analysis of drama ‘fits in very much with Stanislavsky’s acting processes’. For Merlin, the analysis of a character’s ‘inner, physical and verbal actions’ coincides with the key inference, drawn from Aristotle, that to know the character’s actions is to know how to dramatize the Greek text (2010, 11–12). In French and Bennett’s Experiencing Stanislavsky Today (2016) ‘play analysis tools’, derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, provide the lens for an actor’s first reading of a drama, and set the stage for the application of Stanislavski-­ based exercises (2016, 305–6). Theatre director and educator Fritz Ertl also upholds this tradition of understanding plot and character in primary training (Playwrights Horizon Theater School), citing Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and its ‘story of a man’s hubris leading to his downfall’ as a classic paradigm, which actors are meant to deconstruct into the principles of ‘situation’, ‘complication’, and ‘resolution’ (252–3). Comparably, Graham Ley’s practical guide to Acting Greek Tragedy (2014), briefly discussed in this volume’s introduction, offers actors insights into tragic characters based on a ‘transactional’ analysis of ancient drama. Ley suggests that transactions ‘move things forward, they represent the script in motion as a set of actions which make a play’ and that these ‘should be drawn directly from the script, and closely represent what the script actually ‘is’ (9). The Stanislavski principles underscoring this approach are evident in the cause-and-effect perception of actions, while Ley reinforces the problematic (Aristotelian) impression that Greek tragedy is essentially a written form of drama, downplaying the form’s performance-­based origins and physiological demands. In such accounts of tragedy and its challenges, insights and claims deriving from Aristotle and Stanislavski (as well as those attributed to both by their various followers) are blended together in some complex—and sometimes, unconscious—ways. There is also a sense in which the dialectical nature of Stanislavski’s work mirrors classical rhetoric; arriving at a verifiable ‘truth’ in an acting context (through proof) rests on a set pattern of argument and counter-­ argument (between teacher/trainer and student). This process reflects ancient guidelines intended to provide a speaker with mastery over language and expression, and therefore efficacy in a public space. In

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Stanislavski’s published training manuals, a fictional student (Kostya) and a teacher (Tortsov) engage in a kind of problem-solving dialectics. Clare Yule’s analysis of Stanislavski’s ‘rhetorical disposition’, drawing from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, explains this quasi-rhetorical experience: Exordium—the objection to an actor’s approach; Narratio—a diagnosis of the problem; Divisio—a reasoning of the actor’s work; Confirmatio—a prescription towards solutions; Confutatio—a rebuttal of opposing views; and a Peroratio—a conclusive (and congenial) summary (141–70).20 This distinctive ‘rhetorical’ style, in which Stanislavski commits the actor’s process to analytical interrogation through measured proofs and arguments, habituates rational argument and debate in the rehearsal room, effectively eclipsing poetic, intuitive, or physical impulses. At the close of this discussion, it is also worth noting the mythologizing power of the term ‘classical’. In the context of the modern reception of Greek tragedy, Margherita Laera states: ‘Every community has its own myths, which enable mechanisms of cultural identification and a degree of social cohesion to take place’ (16). The historical legacy of Stanislavski (in actor training) and that of Aristotle (for textual analysis), when perceived or promoted as ‘classical’, especially within a teaching or training  curriculum,  ensures their dominant position in a series of narratives concerning theatre practice, which are deemed to be enduring, proven, and valuable. In this way actors, as a community of learners, or even disciples of a particular system, may engage in myth-making, part of which involves absorbing and replicating doctrinal attitudes concerning rehearsal language and processes. When, in An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski’s fictional teacher/director (and alter ego) interrogates actors’ actions and outcomes, the insights eventually extricated from them is given witness by those present in the room. Collective agreement instantiates a communal belief in an apparent truth. When actors and teachers hold a text of Greek tragedy, and choose to abide by a set of ‘rules’ which rationalize and structure the process of interpreting and acting such a play, it comparably galvanizes a particular psychological reaction to the exercises being undertaken in that rehearsal space. Moreover, and more problematically, such choices (deliberately or not) activate particular exclusions and hierarchies. An appeal to ‘classical’ wisdom (and this is by no means exclusive to Stanislavski-based practices) often privileges the teacher in the role of approver and validator of students’ responses, a situation  exacerbated by an  overemphasis on the authority of the written word which generates an imbalance between intellectual and somatic approaches to interpreting and exploring tragic plays. Furthermore, the (frequently unspoken) understanding that present-day

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practice should aspire to replicate historical meanings and effects can rest upon universalizing concepts of gender, culture, and performance (Malague), often in ways which stifle potential creativity.

3.6   Contemporary Acting and the Psychophysical By contrast, contemporary actor training is characterized by innovative methods, which aim to re-locate the psychophysical within a continuum of processual options for the actor, while concurrently attempting to avoid or undo former hierarchical relationships, in which physical training or embodied explorations occupied a subordinate position to text-based practices. Michael Lugering’s The Expressive Actor (2007), David Zinder’s Body Voice Image and the Chekhov Technique (2002), Phillip Zarrilli’s Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski (2009), John Gillett’s and Christine Gutekunst’s Voice into Acting (2014), and Experience Bryon’s Integrative Performance (2014) all provide examples of such systematic, practical research combined with  studio knowledge. They also provide a sense of what a continuum of psychological and physical approaches might do for Greek tragedy. These approaches emphasize a ‘continuum’ between text-based and body-based processes. As Merlin suggests in Beyond Stanislavsky (2001), ‘inner feeling and outer expression happen at the same time’ (27).21 Synergistic principles of psychophysical work are also supported by readings of cognitive science. For example, actor-training theorist Rhonda Blair argues that ‘there is an organic, biological ground out of which self, character, sense of narrative, and hence acting grow’ (169). In addition: Feeling and consciousness, conditioned by culture, grow out of bodily schemas, which are the product of neural networks, which are themselves the result of various kinds of experiential and cognitive memory, including, for want of a better term, neural memory (172–3).22

Ideas in cognitive science can validate  a  modern actor’s exploration  of  the interconnectedness of ‘inner’ unseen neural processes and ‘outer’ physical gestures, speech, and movement. The desire to move beyond a narrowly psychological reception of Stanislavski has also coincided with post-structural discourses such as phenomenology, semiotics, performativity, contemporary feminisms, and historiography, which have variously  cast doubt on the universal applicability of psychological

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truth in acting, or indeed, the construct of the actor (Auslander, 55). This makes for an invigorating context in which to re-approach the challenges and potentials of ancient tragedy, a form in which the actor is asked to negotiate between multiple performance modes, including song and dance, in the course of strikingly non-realist, and mythically fluid, dramatic narratives. Among other possibilities, the notion of an independent acting self may be critically destabilized by the experiential provocation of choral practice (see Chap. 7), while processes rooted in co-creative storytelling may call into question the acting self as a stand-alone, self-determining entity (see Chap. 5). And yet, Stanislavski-derived acting approaches continue to marginalize such concerns, in part because of the pervasive logocentrism of Stanislavski’s own accounts of his work. Any rediscovery of the ‘system’, he argued, ‘must begin with the realization that it is the questions which are ­important, the logic of their sequence and the consequence logic of the answers’ (Benedetti 1999, 376–7). In his Method of Physical Action, the stage management of actions occurs in three inductive stages which, according to Benedetti, involve first a ‘step by step’ analysis of the factually defined circumstances in the play, devoid of ‘reference to emotion or feeling’; then, careful ‘study of the text’ in context of history and background; and finally, the process of ‘shaping these insights’ into believable performance (2005, 121–2). Moreover, in prescribing the preparatory work of the actor, Stanislavski assumes that repositories of emotional (conceptual) and sense (physical) memories, while assisting the actor in imagining the feelings and motivations of the character role, must necessarily be deployed in a logical unbroken chain of actions. As Stanislavski’s Tortsov tells his acting students: A long series of small, medium, and large lines of life in the role all go one way, towards the Supertask, the short lines of life in the role and their tasks, alternate and are linked to each other in logical sequence. Thanks to that, one continuous through line is created, running through the entire play. (cited in Evans, 164)23

Effectively, and despite the rich potentials of psychophysical practice, the Stanislavski-trained actor is still primed, first and foremost, to script actions. Or as Auslander puts it, ‘Stanislavskian acting can be seen as a form of “writing”’ (55).24 The actor is treated as a rational author who, when encountering a dramatic text such as Greek tragedy, literally scripts

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ideas about their emotions and objectives into their actions, aiming to craft an apparently truthful performance. In this process, actors’ thoughts (and their relationship to the text) potentially take precedence over physical experiences and embodied knowledge. However, by rediscovering the psychophysical process as a continuum, the contemporary actor is placed in a position to question existing ­ hierarchies and explore the potential liberation that physical/ somatic expressions of the body may bring to the challenge of acting Greek tragedy. Such an actor may choose not only to be the ‘writer’ of actions (a conception recalling Aristotelian priorities) but also an artful negotiator of multiple performance skills, including a range of embodied and collaborative practices. As Zarrilli suggests: ‘The actor must develop a psychophysical process, tactics, and mode of engaging images different from most approaches to character acting in order to fulfil the rigorous demands of an embodied inhabitation of form and content’ (2002, 19). The challenge that Stanislavski began to grapple with more than a century ago—and which actor training continues to face today—is how to negotiate the different levels of priority accorded to psychological and physical approaches across various integrative systems. In all preparatory processes, there are moments when thinking or talking predominate, and others when the quieted mind finds inspiration through movement or vocal exercises. When and how do actors engage in conscious iteration and reason-bound pursuit of exercises which may lead to a mastery of a skill, of an objective, a gesture, or an act? When and how do improvised and spontaneous acts, as enriching and discoveryladen as they may be, become distilled, edited, and (yes) critically assessed for their appropriateness or effectiveness? In relation to the text, how and when does the actor need to give instruction to the body to follow what’s in the mind, and how can they (equally) mute conscious thought or judgement and allow bodily expressions to initiate different kinds of experience and knowing? In this way, the contemporary performer (as the curator of their own professional toolkit, and perhaps also the originator of their own creative works) is confronted with a vital series of decisions about how and where they choose to place and develop different aspects of their own practice on a densely populated continuum of psychophysically integrative approaches and disciplines.

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3.7   What If? Stanislavski presumes the actor, as Aristotle assumed the poet, to be primarily a thinking, analytical being (a logocentric artist). And, from the perspective of Greek tragedy, there are many moments when an ordered, hierarchical scheme may indeed work for the contemporary actor. Consider the cut-and-thrust pace of passages of stichomythia, when characters speak alternative lines of verse that are nearly symmetrical in length. Faced with such textual passages, it is indisputably useful to decide what points, or ‘beats’, signify a change in a character’s objectives. In relation to the narrative and emotional trajectory of a Medea or an Electra, the super-­ objective of revenge may help unify the different acting choices made in each scene. But crucially absent from such analytical processes is a sense of how embodied responses may enable insightful and penetrating visions of the text before logical frameworks take hold and predetermine the judgements and actions of the performer. How, for instance, might an actor establish a sense of beats and objectives through the use of breath? Or how do physical impulses travel through the body in response to certain poetic words, phrases, or images? Harnessing both kinds of preparations—the psychological analysis of character on the one hand, and physiological and improvisational approaches on the other—constitutes the sort of integrative approach sought by a great variety of contemporary actor-training processes today. In the chapters that follow, some of these approaches are used to help stage a series of provocations that introduce alternative ways of thinking and doing Greek tragedy, exploring the potentials of body, breath, sound, storytelling, space, place, and chorus—as well as (although not pre-­ eminently) text-based character analysis. However, the present discussion concludes by recalling the three scenarios introduced at the beginning of this chapter, this time challenging the hierarchical assumptions embedded within traditional (psychologizing rather than psychophysical) readings of Stanislavski-inspired practice, and instead asking ‘what if?’ • What if not just text but also breath? In the case of the role of Cassandra, the actor seeks to access a personal experience so she can properly ‘feel’ the role of the doomed prophetess. The problem she encounters is the unreliability of retrieving emotional or sense-based memories; sometimes during rehearsals she connects with them; at other times, mental images lose traction in her scheme of actions. What

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if her memory correlated with a sense perception of the depth, density, speed, or other qualities of her breath, and this in turn correlated with some simple physical actions which corresponded to the general condition of that feeling? Would this enriched relationship between psychological memory and physiological state generate increased certainty, confidence, or creativity when working on the role? Perhaps a combination of Stanislavski’s work on tempo-rhythm and the sonic resonances of voice and breath might allow for the creation of such a response. • What if not just text but also performance score? In the case of the role of Oedipus, the actor is a trained runner and construes his sporting knowledge as an interpretive tool for approaching the ‘step by step’ sequence of events leading to Oedipus ‘hitting the wall’. He analyses every step of the way; he even maps out a racetrack of turns, hurdles, starting lines, midway points, and the exact pace of his run. When he gets the part onto its feet (so to speak), he thinks he knows what Oedipus is meant to do, but his body isn’t doing it. The transition of this physical concept into the activation of the role is effectively flat-­footed and lifeless. The problem here is that the actor has approached the text as a fixed mental schema to act from, rather than as an open-­ended performance score. Would exploring the phonetic or rhythmic qualities of the poetry, where words sit (and sound)  in relation to each other, turn this rigidly staged run of actions into an improvised composition, inspiring dance-like moves for instance? Can this actor train his eyes to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ a performance score, rather than to ‘read’ the words on the page, awakening in the body and mind an enriched sense of psychophysical possibilities? • What if not just text but also imaginative sense of space? The actor preparing to embody a cross-gendered Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae ends up miming vintage rock’n’roll icons, especially observing the tempo and rhythm of their movements and speech, as a way of channelling the anarchic energy she wants to bring to her performance. While the skill and accuracy of her mimesis is evident, and while there’s a plethora of energy in the characterization, she seems to be flailing and air-guitaring in a haze of clichéd iconic representations. While this actor has attempted to fuse psychological and physical aspects of the work, there doesn’t appear to be a spatial or architectural context

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through which these representations are communicated. Might a complementary contemporary approach, such as Bogart and Landau’s ‘Viewpoints’ (discussed in Chap. 6), potentially facilitate a sense of purposeful play in relation to the actor’s immediate environment, helping to particularize and focus the images blazing away in her head and body? A dynamic interrelationship between the vital and the mechanical, the invisible and the visible, the sensed and the reasoned is crucial to Stanislavski’s psychophysical system. A classical sense of Stanislavski’s practice can encourage actors to think too much or too literally of a character-­ role’s tasks, supertasks, and through actions. By contrast, the formal challenges of Greek tragedy require that such ‘horizontal’ thinking must alternate with a series of ‘vertical’ moments, dominated by a sense of immediate bodily presence, and an intensely experienced conjunction of sound, story, space, and ensemble. Too great an emphasis on ‘horizontal’ aspects of Stanislavski-based acting practice, taken in combination with Aristotelian criticism, have historically tended to entrench hierarchical relations between psychology and physicality, analysis and presence.  Contemporary integrative approaches, on the other hand offer a range of alternative routes by which the embodied actor can potentially begin to access ancient roles and plays, and their formal challenges. Finally, it’s important to remember that Stanislavski’s psychophysical system was continually  being developed and refined through an open-ended and reflective creative practice. This book aspires to re-approach the acting of Greek tragedy in the same spirit, drawing on a diverse array of contemporary practices not to articulate its own fixed method, but rather to pose a series of provocative, and playful ‘what ifs’.

Notes 1. For a comprehensive overview of Stanislavski’s legacy as director, artist, and pedagogue, see White (2013). 2. How the claims of actor training now refer to the sciences of the brain or mind to validate or reinforce its basic principles; see McConachie & Hart (2006). 3. Stanislavski recalls how he came up with the idea of connecting feeling with inner truth in these terms: ‘During one performance in which I was repeating a role I had played many times, suddenly, without any apparent cause,

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I perceived the inner meaning of the truth long known to me that creativeness on the stage demands first of all a special condition […]. For an actor, to perceive is to feel. For this reason I can say that it was on that evening that I “first perceived a truth long known to me”’ (cited in Evans, 5). 4. Authoritative claims about ‘truth’ have been summarily criticized in contemporary actor training. See Zarrilli (2002, introduction) and Malague (2012). 5. The term perezhivanie has several related meanings. Essentially, its use is an attempt by Stanislavski to differentiate a quality of acting that conveys an ‘ongoing organic’ process or ‘emotional experience’ in the performer as opposed to a mechanical, unspontaneous, and artificial form of acting (Krasner, 197). In translation, the Russian sense of ‘living through’ an experience became confused with the anglicized sense of ‘undergoing’ a personal experience; hence the heavy reliance on personal memories and histories for many actors who learn acting in the studio systems of America (Benedetti 2005, 147). 6. Elizabeth R Hapgood’s accounts of Stanislavski’s work include An Actor Prepares (1936), Building a Character (1948), and Creating a Role (1957). Jean Benedetti’s translations, An Actor’s Work (2008b) and An Actor’s Work on a Role (2010), offer a more comprehensive and updated translation of Stanislavski’s formal writing and reflections. 7. Bella Merlin similarly accounts for psychophysical work which, in her definition, ‘aims to inculcate within actors an interdependent sense of their inner-personal psyche and outer-physical characterisation’, operating on the principle that a physical action generates psychological reactions, and vice versa (2007, 23–5). 8. On Aristotle’s logocentrism, see Lehmann (19–21). 9. For example, Wiles suggests the ancient concept of mind (phrên) was associated with the region of breathing near the lower torso, which generated thoughts and words, and the liver (êpar) was the site of profound emotions (2000, 154). 10. On approaches to staging the gods of tragedy, see Goldhill (Chap. 6). 11. Plato articulates this conundrum in his interrogation of an ancient singing poet (rhapsode) named Ion, discussed in more detail in Chap. 5 (Acting Myth). 12. Stanislavski was also influenced by the ideas of Russian realism, informed by Pushkin and Gogol, who maintained that literature and theatre needed a truthful portrayal of real life—what was common to humanity—to be powerful and effective (Benedetti 2005, 109). 13. Aristotle (arguably) comes tantalizingly close, in his Nichomachean Ethics, to a rule-of-thumb principle which may apply to Stanislavski’s sense of balance between emotional indulgence and mechanical distance, when he advises poets to seek the mean ‘between excess and defect’ (Kenny, xxiii).

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14. See further the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on ‘Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy’ (2006, revised 2018). Available from: https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/ (viewed 1 March 2018). 15. The ‘coherent articulation of the system of rules’ that Stanislavski provided in his work, proceeds, in much the same way as Aristotle’s writings about nature, inductively from ‘micro to macro levels’ (Yule, 48). 16. For discussions of Stanislavski, technology, and science today, see Pitches (2009) and Pitches & Aquilina (2017). 17. See van den Bosch (2013). 18. ‘The actor passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life’, and thereby induces a ‘feeling of truth’ (Stanislavski cited by Fortier, 48). 19. Nonetheless, it would be appropriate to exercise some caution in this labcoat view of Stanislavski. While he may have wanted art to be on ‘good terms with science’ (Benedetti 1982, xxiv), he in fact drew scientific ideas from early psychological theories, such as those developed by ThéoduleArmand Ribot (1839–1916) on affective emotional states, and William James (1842–1910) on consciousness and subjective experience. Ribot and James combined metaphysics and early cognitive thinking to describe human behaviour and emotion, which suited Stanislavski’s descriptive and explanatory language of acting. 20. On ancient commentaries concerning oratory, rhetoric, and the actor, see Benedetti (2005, 17–21). 21. Other resources which stage new discussions and applications of psychophysical work include Carnicke (2009), White (2013), Benedetti (2010), and Gillett (2014). 22. Blair’s assumptions here are based on a reading of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s work on emotions and cognition. 23. Compare Benedetti (2008a, 292). 24. Auslander further argues that there is no essential ‘logocentric’ actor, referring to Derrida’s sense of différance: things are defined not by something essential within them but in relation to their difference to other things or actions (58–9). Voice studies scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis (2015) argues similarly from the standpoint that the phenomenon of the individual voice is too complex in its affective powers and significations to simply be perceived as a vehicle or sounding board for ‘logos-as-reason’ knowledge.

References Auslander, P. 2002, ‘“Just Be Your Self”: Logocentrism and the Difference in Performance Theory’, in P.  Zarrilli (ed), Acting Reconsidered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, Routledge, London, pp. 53–60. Benedetti, J. 1982, Stanislavski: An Introduction, Theatre Arts Books, New York.

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Benedetti, J. 1999, Stanislavski: His Life and Art, Methuen, London. Benedetti, J.  2005, The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting from Classical Times to the Present Day, Methuen, London. Benedetti, J. 2008a, Stanislavski and the Actor: The Final Acting Lessons, 1935–8, Methuen, London. Benedetti, J.  2008b, Konstantin Stanislavski: An Actor’s Work, Routledge, Abingdon. Benedetti, J. 2010, Konstantin Stanislavski: An Actor’s Work on a Role, Routledge, Abingdon. Blair, R. 2006, ‘Image and Action: Cognitive Neuroscience and Actor-training’, in B. McConachie & F.E. Hart (eds), Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, Routledge, London, pp. 167–85. Blumenfeld, R. 2008, Using the Stanislavsky System: A Practical Guide to the Character Creation and Period Styles, Limelight Editions, New York. Bryon, E. 2014, Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer, Routledge, Abingdon. Carnicke, S.M. 2009, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, London. Daboo, J.  2013, ‘Stanislavsky and the Psychophysical in Western Acting’, in P.  Zarrilli, J.  Daboo & R.  Loukes, Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 158–93. Ertl, F. 2006, ‘Interdisciplinary Training’, in A.  Bartow (ed.) Training of the American Actor, Theatre Communications Group, New York, pp. 251–68. Evans, M. (ed.). 2015, The Actor Training Reader, Routledge, Abingdon. Fortier, M. 2002, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, Routledge, London. French, S.D., & Bennett, P.G. 2016, Experiencing Stanislavsky Today: Training and Rehearsal for the Psychophysical Actor, Routledge, Abingdon. Gillett, J. 2014, Acting Stanislavski: A Practical Guide to Stanislavski’s Approach and Legacy, Bloomsbury, London. Gillett, J.  & Gutekunst, C. 2014, Voice into Acting: Integrating Voice and the Stanislavski Approach, Bloomsbury, London. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Hamilton, E. & Cairns, H. (eds). 1961, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Hartigan, K. 1995, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater, 1882–1994, Greenwood Press, Westport. Hodge, A. 2000, Twentieth Century Actor Training, Routledge, London. Kenny, A. 2013, Aristotle: Poetics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Krasner, D. 2014, ‘The System, Sense-Emotion Memory, and Physical Action/ Active Analysis: American interpretations of the System’s Legacy’, in R.A. White

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(ed.), The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, Routledge, London, pp. 195–212. Laera, M. 2013, Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Peter Lang, Bern. Lehmann, H.T. 2016, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, Routledge, Abingdon. Ley, G. 2014, Acting Greek Tragedy, University of Exeter Press, Exeter. Malague, R. 2012, An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method”, Routledge, London. McConachie, B. & Hart, F.E. (eds). 2006, Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, Routledge, London. McKeon, R. 1947, Introduction to Aristotle, Random House, New York. Merlin, B. 2001, Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-physical Approach to Actor Training, Routledge, New York. Merlin, B. 2007, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, Nick Hern Books, London. Merlin, B. 2010, Acting: The Basics, Routledge, London. Pitches, J.  2009, Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting, Routledge, London. Pitches, J.  & Aquilina, S. 2017, Stanislavsky in the World: The System and Its Transformations Across Continents, Bloomsbury, London. Riley, K. 2008, The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles: Reasoning Madness, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Roach, J.R. 1985, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, University of Delaware Press, Newark. Thomaidis, K. 2015, ‘The Re-vocalization of Logos?: Thinking, Doing and Disseminating Voice’, in K. Thomaidis & B. Macpherson (eds), Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience, Routledge, London, pp. 10–22. Toporkov, O. 1979, Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years, Theatre Arts Books, New York. van den Bosch, Heleen. 2013, ‘Anatomy of a Psycho-Physical Technique: The Underlying Structure of Stanislavski’s “System”’, Stanislavski Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 3–43. White, R.A. (ed.). 2013, The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, Routledge, Abingdon. Whyman, R. 2008, The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2000, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2007, ‘Aristotle’s Poetics and Ancient Dramatic Theory’, in J.M. Walton & M.  McDonald (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 92–107.

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Yule, Y. 2014, ‘A Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience in Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares’, PhD thesis, Goldsmith’s College, University of London, London. Zarrilli, P. (ed.). 2002, Acting (Re)considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, Routledge, London. Zarrilli, P. 2009, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, Routledge, London.

CHAPTER 4

Acting Sound

4.1   From the Auditorium: Strange Resonances As the lights dim on the Malthouse Theatre’s version of Sophocles’ Antigone,1 the first sound that I hear is the grind and squeal of metal. Is this an abattoir, a garbage shredder, a place of death? My imagination is stirred into overdrive. I know that Antigone begins in the aftermath of a bloodbath between two warring brothers, who have battled over control of Thebes. Do the sounds signify the mechanical apparatus of state disposing of corpses? Not long after this gruesome atmosphere takes hold of my imagination, a lone female voice emerges. It is a mournful song, in a foreign language (possibly ancient Greek?). It belongs to Antigone, I presume, the titular protagonist of the tragedy. Next this is interrupted by a public address, a woman’s voice, statesmanlike in its intonation. The speech is rhythmic, regular. The Leader’s tone rings, her pitch is focused and somehow attuned to the verses she is speaking. She informs the audience of the current status quo: two brothers—one a traitor, the other a hero—are to be dealt with according to state protocols. The former is denied burial rites, and the latter granted full honours. The speech is deliberately heightened and formal, energized by exacting rhythms and an oratorical tone. A short interlude follows: a patriotic celebration in a far-off place, and then the mechanisms of state literally grind to a halt. The soundscape slowly wanes, and what forms in the vacuum is the sound of a familiar, domestic dialogue. It is at once poignant and furtive. This must be the two sisters, Antigone seeking the help of Ismene. Their words are short, vital, and relatively symmetrical in the exchange. Their heads and © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_4

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shoulders are glimpsed, their vulnerable bodies framed in a small window, their sound filtered through a microphone. The vocal resonance makes me sense how closely allied they are, and yet these are women separated in the crossfire of the state’s decrees. At the same time, there is something contemporary about their conversation; it is direct, everything they say seems to count, their lines are the length of life-or-death tweets. The daughters of Oedipus are locked in a struggle to do the right thing: for Antigone, to honour the dead through the rite of burial, for Ismene, to seek a compromise with the needs of the city-state, and with the authority of Creon, who desires to bring order to Thebes. Throughout the first ten or so minutes of my experience, the quality of voice and soundscape powerfully evoke a war-­ shocked world. I hear a text delivered at times in a way which sounds rhythmic and lyrical (almost like a song, or somewhere between speech and song). This sounding of the text seems to take me to the heart of these characters, how they feel internally, how they breathe to survive, or to prepare for death. Antigone moves about (and is also ferried around) like a puppet, her rigid and inert body reflected in the monotone melodies of a tragic figure already imprisoned by her fateful actions. Ismene paces, whines, and sparks through her words, on the edge of a madness which comes from being torn between her love of a sister and the state. One of the striking features is how the choral element of the original play is absorbed into solo monologues. The Torturer, a kind of singular chorus, delivers a modernized version of Sophocles’ choral ‘Ode to Man’. The tone of voice is appropriately ghoulish as he attends (uncharacteristically for the chorus) to the ritualistic torture of his victim. Another distinctive feature is the dialogue that takes place between the Leader (the Creon character) and,  alternatively, Antigone, Haemon, and eventually the Bureaucrat (the messenger who brings tragic news); these scenes are constructed as though they were musical duets. I note as well how  the patterns of speech throughout the translated play have different densities and speeds. Some patches of text express a quality of choral lyricism, are imagistic and reflective, and spoken with songful-ness; other sections of text resonate with the rapid fire of stichomythia, the symmetrical pairing of lines shared between two characters, and are tonally drier. Throughout the final section of the play, there is also an overarching scheme in the patterned text, from muscular and ringing political sloganeering and speechifying to a kind of decomposition, the oozing totalitarian state (signified in the flooding stage) which culminates in a drip feed of words communicated between the Bureaucrat and the Leader.

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Overall, I sense perhaps a greater somatic response to the text—an integration of the body, voice, and language—in the Leader’s performance. This role is being played by Jane Montgomery Griffiths, actor and classicist, who also translated the play. Griffiths, like many actors of her generation, was influenced by John Barton’s approach to Shakespeare (made famous in Playing Shakespeare, 1984). Her sound pings, comes across newly minted; her voice responds to the musical qualities of the text. Her physicality also seems aligned to this richly intoned vocal production. If she is intentionally conveying the presence of a fearsome and powerful leader, it is not directed through psychological profiling (no granite stares, stabbing asides, or dictatorial gestures) but by subtle movements that engage both voice and body. In the play’s translated text Griffiths pays homage to the complex combination of metrical styles Sophocles used to construct this play, its  rhythmic metres consisting of long and short stresses of  syllables, associated (in ancient philosophy and aesthetics) with different emotional experiences. Through an immersive sense of embodied writing, as Griffiths records: ‘I wrote improvising around the Greek I knew inside me, spewing out an alternative torrent of bodies, touch, viscerality, and blood, while imagining the energy of bodies in space’ (xi). Thus, performing metres meant embodying the textures, vowels, and other vocal-linguistic aspects of the text. Griffiths’ translation is not an ‘act of linguistic fidelity, but of performative equivalence’, finding contemporary sounds for 2,500-year-old lines (xi). Griffiths’ contemporary re-interpretation of tragedy means finding ways to make the ‘strange resonances’ (x) of an ancient drama come shockingly alive.

4.2   Acting Sound: An Introduction The re-performance of ancient drama can  require a responsive actor’s body attuned to a text’s rich seam of rhythms, breath patterns, complex shaping of dramatic verse, and the sensory qualities of words.2 It demands a physical/vocal response that is reactive, awake, and imaginative, responding not just to the meaning of the text but also to its inherent musical design (Scott), or ‘somatic promptings’ (Harrop 2010, 232–3). Tragedy invites the actor to become a performer who embodies musicality, a resonant being, engaged with the sound of text as well as with its meanings. When Stanislavski trained opera singers, he perceived no difference between the actor and the singer (at least in a theatrical context). His systematic work with the Bolshoi Opera Studio involved singers cross-­training,

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as his actors did, in voice, diction, and movement (Carnicke & Rosen 2014, 126; Renaud 2014).3 Stanislavski approached operatic music as though it were a play to be analysed; the music’s rhythm, tempo, text-­lyrics, and melody afforded insights into the psychological make-up of operatic roles in the same way that objectives embedded in a dramatic text supplied the actor with access to the inner life of a character. Singers would be asked to work on lyric-texts by Russian composers such as Rimsky-­ Korsakov and Tchaikovsky as if they were monologues, before they attended to singing matters. Likewise, it made sense to Stanislavski to analyse the musical scenes of Puccini and Verdi, and to apply the same acting processes an actor would to a scene from a Chekhov play. During this period, Stanislavski was working primarily with singers who prioritized perfecting bel canto style singing (required by the classical-romantic opera repertoire) and who often considered acting a secondary concern,4 but comparable processes of ‘acting through song’ utilize Stanislavski-based principles in contemporary musical theatre, especially incorporating exercises that task the singer to analyse lyric-texts, scenes, and character objectives.5 Such processes attempt to craft music theatre performances which conform to naturalist acting conventions, but this chapter is engaged with a different enterprise: the challenge of generating acting performances shaped by a tragic text’s musicality, and the somatic energies of vocalization.6 Acting Sound focuses on sounding in the contemporary acting of tragedy, beginning with an examination of the relationship between music and poetry in ancient Athens, before exploring subsequent practitioners’ approaches to synthesizing breath, image, voice, and body in modern performance of ancient plays. Reading Greek tragedy as a type of musical score also raises the important issue of translations. Although most English-speaking actors will probably encounter the texts of tragedy via translation,7 they will nonetheless fail to release the full power and energy of an ancient play without a deep excavation of the drama’s musical structure. This requires understanding the very different idiomatic styles of the three extant Athenian dramatists, but also how different modern translations re-imagine each play’s vocal and physical registers, which potentially re-connect the actor’s body and imagination to tragedy’s lost sound world. The categorical imperiousness of Aristotle’s reception of Greek tragedy has already been discussed (Chap. 2). Yet his prioritizing, in Poetics, of ‘hearing’ over ‘seeing’ might just give the modern actor pause. Aristotle thought it was important for writers of tragic verse to align the right rhythm with the right words to affect the appropriate emotions, and for

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the composition of songs—or melopoiia—to match the visual appearance of things in the performance space—or opsis (Wiles 2000, 169).8 As has already been outlined, the ancient philosopher’s insistent hierarchizing of the senses is eschewed by contemporary acting approaches. However, the relationship between music and poetry within tragedy was vital to the form’s rich palette of moods, effects, and meanings.

4.3   Music and Poetry in Ancient Athens In ancient Greek tragedy, the interdependence of music and metre gave rich ‘complexity to the word-rhythms’ (Dale, 41). A modern understanding would tend to separate music into rhythm, melody, and harmony, and analyse this as an art form distinct from language. For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry was infused with musicality through the rhythm and construction of words. Dale suggests that in the ancient Greek language, ‘word-­ accent, rising or falling in pitch, was audible through the quantitative rhythm’ (236). In context of Greek tragic verse, she further describes how the addition of instrumental music, or vocal singing possibly ‘steadie[d] and determine[d] the more approximate quantities of speech’ (236). In a modern music composition, there are rules and notations which ‘steady’ and ‘determine’ the arrangement of notes or sounds so that they are performable and repeatable. Perhaps Greek tragedy, as a performance structure, similarly formalized the musicality of Greek language so performers could remember and repeat a drama’s physical and vocal actions. Given the interdependence of music and metre, it is unsurprising that ancient philosophers had much to say about the theoretical components of music in relation to poetry, and their combined effect on moral education. The pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras taught the healing powers of musical intervals based on mathematical principles derived from cosmological order (Wheelwright, 200–34).9 In Athens, philosophers were keen to police the effects of music and its combination with poetry. Plato, for instance, advocated a strict alertness to the educational quality of musical modes. In the Republic and Laws, he elucidated the proper composition of words, melody, and rhythm.10 For instance, Ionian and Lydian modes have a mellowing effect, making them inappropriate for songs used in training for warfare. Plato was particularly critical of musical innovations in the theatre, and of dramatists who (in his view) corrupted the proper uses of poetry and music-making. In Greek tragic performance, the chorus was accompanied by the aulos, an extremely expressive woodwind

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instrument (something like a double-reed pipe) which Plato condemned for its potentially orgiastic, and morally corrupting, sound.11 Plato’s censorious views offer important insights into the significant effect tragic poetry was understood to have upon its audiences. Music in tragedy was part of a wider cultural arts network (mousikê), and citizens of Athens regularly participated in choral dance and song (khoreia) as part of the city-state’s social and religious culture. In Plato’s Laws, for instance, choral singing and dancing for the gods was a matter of  demonstrating ‘clear-cut emotional and ethical tropoi [rules]’ (Kowalzig, 49), where excellence in the virtue of worship was proven by skilful singing and well-­executed movements. The pervasiveness of song and dance in the city’s public and ritual spaces meant that the Athenian audience, when experiencing the sound Greek tragedy in the theatre (whether through song, lyrical phrases, or the rhythmical impulses of the verse), would have been aware of playwrights’ ingenious appropriations of references from their immediate song culture and traditions. Tragedy’s close fusion of songful-­ness and textual-ness, as classicist Gregory Sifakis (2001) suggests, created a ‘musicopoetical language’ (30–1). Earlier models of songful performance also permeated Athenian culture, where the archaic bard Homer was still celebrated as a paradigm of the poetic singer and performer. Modern studies of the Iliad and the Odyssey have revealed formulae operating in the composition of these works, proving  that Homeric epic emerged from an oral culture where multiple performers and interpreters created new variants on old myths, ‘integrating traditional elements of poetic composition with the individual singer’s invention’: Homeric epic emerged out of oral traditions capable of generating works of great complexity and power, rooted in a shared corpus of heroic songs flexibly composed and re-composed during their live performance (Harrop 2018, 262)12

Singing in the Homeric tradition would usually have been accompanied by a stringed instrument such as a phorminx (an ancient form of lyre), which allowed the performer to improvise within a limited range of melodies.13 These melodies would have sustained or underscored the vocalization of a mythic song-story, guided by inherited metrical structures, and the syllable lengths present in Greek language (West 1981). The epic-­singer’s

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choice of rhythmic patterns and sound effects may have been based on their effective alignment to particularly arresting poetic images or narrations. At the same time, a lyrical moment may have been embellished to emphasize or enrich the parts of a text the singer deemed important for their listening audience.14 Such practices may find a modern equivalence in the art of embellishment in Baroque opera, wherein instrumentalists or singers (such as the famous castrati) improvised in a virtuosic manner to arouse the emotions of their listeners. Present-day hip-hop, rap, and R&B artists may comparably riff on a particular phrase or musical motif to amplify its meaning and emotive effect.

4.4   Song Culture and Tragedy Because Greek tragic language essentially developed out of a ‘song culture’ (Herington, 3–10), both tragedy’s dramatists and its ancient spectators, as living repositories of songs, would have embodied memories of hymns and melodies performed at funerals, weddings, festivals, or other ritual occasions. This musicalized poetry would be remembered not only in the context of the activities in which it was sung, but also in relation to specific lyric metres. Operating within such a rich culture of music and poetry, Athenian tragedians were keen to establish their cultural innovativeness, both as part of the competitive nature of the festival in which their works were featured, and in relation to Athens’ desire to be the centre of Hellenic culture. The surviving works of the three extant dramatists evidence the use of various types of sung poetry. They contain complicated metres, different linguistic registers, and meticulously patterned exchanges between individual actors and the chorus. In addition, these materials are structured in such a way that the musicality of the materials sustains both narrative and dramaturgy. For instance, the opening scene of Antigone (c.441 BCE) sets the pace and foreboding atmosphere for the rest of the play, its musical and rhythmic patterns giving formal expression to the drama’s opposition between secular and religious beliefs, the conflict at the heart of the tragic story. In this exchange, Antigone secretly meets her sister Ismene to discuss their uncle Creon’s decree concerning the burial of their brothers. The closeness of the sisters, whose sibling loyalty is tested by Antigone’s determination to have her way, is suggested in the symmetrical construction of the text. Antigone stages her case with a lengthy speech, interrogatory in tone, to which Ismene responds more cordially in nearly the same number

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of lines.15 The dialogue develops into another pair of symmetrical speeches, a kind of thesis and antithesis of the problem: Antigone, first, laments their situation, and then is answered by Ismene, whose tone is more considerate and pragmatic. But what began in a balanced pairing of speeches and dialogue soon degenerates into a conflictual point and counterpoint, evenly matched in their emotive force. Structurally, this scene is composed of a short introductory exchange, a balance of both forces, followed by two speeches nearly equal in length, and finally the cut and thrust of argument using emotive language, which is less measured and reasoned. For the contemporary actor playing Antigone or Ismene, whether re-­ imagined in contemporary terms or in self-consciously ‘classical’ style, both voice and body will have to take into account the kind of energy that is expended through this three-part structure. Too vocal and exasperated at the start, and the central speeches and discordant ending will lose their dramatic impact; too much scream and clamour, and a listener may lose their sense of the measured argument contained in the balance of lines. This sequence may be read as a three-part musical form, which  opens dialogically (duet), formulates into two speeches (solos), and descends into turmoil and painful parting (polyphony). The purposeful orchestration invites different qualities of vocal sound across the three sections. And this is just one of the ways in which ancient tragic playwrights enhanced dramatic narrative through sophisticated use of poetic and musical devices.

4.5   Lament and Monody One of the key moments in which the modern actor is likely to encounter the musicality of Greek tragedy is when characters, in a state of grief, lament their situation in conjunction with a chorus (or chorus leader) who chant an interchange with them in collective witness of suffering. When characters lament in Greek drama, their ritual vocalizations such as ‘i-o’ or ‘ai-ai’ are plaintive, even primal outpourings. These are powerful emotive sounds and, for the ancient listener, possibly evoked ritualistic behaviour associated with funerals, where keening, a formalized wailing, expressed the communal sharing of personal grief. The tragedians take this practice further and create elaborate theatrical moments out of the sonic potency of lament. The opening lines of Electra (in Sophocles’ Electra, date unknown), represents such an extended lament:

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‘O holy light and air that has an equal share of earth how many dirges have you heard me sing, and how many blows have you heard me aim against my bleeding breast […]’ (trans. Jones, 175). Antigone’s procession to her entombment and death comparably evokes a funereal atmosphere, complicated by the fact that her pious cause and the human will to live are in painful conflict with each other. Faced with these musically suggestive passages, it’s easy to imagine how modulation between major and minor keys, or pitch differentiations, might support the theatrical realization of this kind of moment.16 Such impassioned passages, shared between protagonist and chorus, are generally referred to as the kommos, which is an ancient term for a lyrical song of lament. For the classicist Nicole Loraux, this utmost strain in language is the ‘cry of cries, materialised into a generic vocal emission, […] the entire register of expressions of sorrow’ (38). Oedipus’ re-entry, for instance, after blinding himself, causes the chorus to sing in response; Electra’s passionate exchange with her brother, Orestes, after the murder of their mother, is in musical dialogue with a singing chorus; and the leader of the defeated Persian army, Xerxes, laments with a chorus of war-­ weary elders, in a repetitive set of strophic exchanges. Today, no one knows for sure what the ancient kommos of Greek tragedy sounded like tonally, but the metrical structures of such musical dialogues indicate the careful aural design underpinning these intensely grief-stricken or pained moments. For example, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, when the Trojan ­princess Cassandra prophesies her bloody fate with the chorus as her witness, her anxious and agitated state is shared (with the chorus) through the use of dochmaics, a rhythmic metre noted for its asymmetrical construction of long stresses interspersed with short ones. The interchange of perturbing rhythms underscores this unsettling dramatic moment. In Euripides’ plays, such passages of lament often develop into extended solo songs, or monodies. These sustained vocalizations drive forward a drama’s narrative and are supported by an unusually wide range of complex metres. Euripides developed this form considerably in his later plays such as Iphigenia in Tauris, Ion, Phoenician Women and Orestes (all probably dating from around the 410s BCE), giving a range of characters lyrically excessive solo speeches/songs.17 The virtuosic aspect of the monody, focusing as it did on the solo actor (and correspondingly diminishing the function of the chorus) would later be exploited by the rising caste of professional actors in the fourth century (Wiles 2000, 163–4).18

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4.6   Musicality and Chorus Athens’ playwrights also developed complex musical/dramatic structures involving the chorus—though different ancient playwrights exploited this element of tragic dramaturgy to different extents.19 Musicality dominates the plays of Aeschylus mainly due to the dramatic importance of their choruses (Scott 1984), who often (as will be seen in Chap. 6) function as the protagonists of their plays. Of the three playwrights whose work survives today, Euripides’ plays may have contained the least music, and scholars have commented on his development of a more colloquial style of dialogue, and the smaller quantity of choral verses found in his surviving plays. By contrast, in Sophocles’ plays, the chorus is given much of the musical material, and several of the major characters have long passages of music (Scott 1996, 18). In Sophocles, these complex metrical networks convey the characters’ and chorus’ emotional journeys. The modern reader of tragedy ought to bear in mind that the text itself, as Scott argues, remains ‘mute’ as to the musical ‘syntax, structures, cadences, idioms, metaphors, and inflection’. Still, Scott maintains, ‘the written record of the Greek language is full enough for scholars to gain some awareness of the dynamics of lyric’s expression and even to reconstruct an approximation of oral speech, if not of song’ (19). Sophocles’ musical design is arguably most evident in the composition of the chorus’ text. The choral odes develop metrically and musically through the drama, so they form an overarching structure to the whole work. The odes may be likened to gauges on a steam engine: the reading from each valve gives the actor an indication where and how pressure in the drama is building or dissipating. In Antigone, the chorus enter singing a victorious hymn (the parodos), charged with images of battle and triumph, invoking the appropriate gods to support them. The strophic form, commonly used in choral odes, is built on symmetrical stanzas or verses, which were sung basically to the same metrical rhythm: one set of lyrics (strophe) is answered by a contrasting set (antistrophe). The energy of this rousing chorus is underscored by anapaestic metres which, like iambic metres, have a forward, ambulatory feeling (in English, it would be similar to the propulsive syllabic motion of de de dum, de de dum). Such ancient metres are used for marching contexts and martial poetry. The next chorus in the tragedy (nicknamed the ‘Ode to Man’) mirrors the regularity and balance of form found in the preceding chorus, where anapaests prevail. This choral passage, focused on the complex attributes of humankind (including the ability to conquer and control elements of nature), also

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expresses some doubt about these apparent virtues. Here, Sophocles uses a ‘mixture of varied interpretive lyrics’, but keeps repeating the ‘factual, anapaestic stanzas’ (Scott, 37). In other words, Sophocles manages to create a kind of rhythmical irony; on the surface, the vibrant musicality established in the first chorus projects the power of the collective, while (in a kind of counterpoint) the lyrical text and the metrical footing are progressively loosened. Midway through the tragedy, Antigone and the chorus engage in shared lament (kommos). Antigone, having been sentenced to death by Creon, enters to sing about her fate before being entombed alive. This shared lament does not, however, reflect a harmony of feelings between the chorus and protagonist, with the former insisting on Antigone’s own agency and culpability: You have not been stricken by wasting sickness; you have not earned the wages of the sword; it was your own choice and alone among mankind you will descend, alive, to the world of death. (trans. Grene, 169)

Similarly, when Antigone, a few lines later, compares her own situation with that of a deity, the chorus are quick in their retort: Yes, but she was a god, and god born, And you are mortal and mortal born. (169)

This degree of friction is conveyed in a number of musical ways. First, Antigone leads the song, not the chorus. Her text is built upon metres taken from the parodos, the chorus’ powerful introduction to the play. Formally, this puts her in competition with them. The chorus respond characteristically and evince pity in their trademark anapaestic rhythms (dee dee  dum). Antigone, feeling derided, responds with a set of scattered metres, expressing her unsettled emotions. In fact, throughout the kommos, as Scott argues, Antigone mirrors the chorus, in a sense usurping or appropriating their emotional efficacy, and in doing so attempting to elevate and memorialize her last moments among the living. Scott continues, ‘the contest to determine the proper perspective on Antigone’s defiance has

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become a lyric debate in which the chorus members must seek to defend their beliefs’ (53–4). The sense of loss and dismay being experienced by both the tragic heroine and the chorus, and their uneasy interactions, are captured musically in this complex interplay of metres.

4.7   The Ancient Singing Actor If the notion of the tragic actor as skilled singer of complex musical scores seems unfamiliar, it’s worth bearing in mind that the earliest performances of mythic narrative in ancient Greece (including Homeric epic) were all strongly associated with music and song. In fact, as Edith Hall asserts, a single root word aeidein is used to describe the singing of both epic and drama in Greek literature (Hall & Easterling, 7).  Moreover, the ancient Greek word tragôidia (which is the origin of the word ‘tragedy’) originally meant something like ‘song for the prize goat’, from  aoidê  (‘song’) and tragos (‘billy-goat’); compare the Modern Greek word tragoudi (‘song’).  Theatrical singers are documented as far back as the tragedies notionally performed by Thespis, a century before classical Greek tragedy (14). And musical aptitude was a necessary precondition for participating in tragic performance in Athens. An actor recruited into a Greek tragedy (as part of the chorus most likely) would commence rehearsals without a script in the modern sense. The dramatist most often seems to have taught the actors face-to-face, imparting ‘the correct intonations, movement and music’ (Wiles 2000, 167). The ‘sound pictures’ embedded in tragic poetry required multiple vocal techniques, including the ability ‘to sing in a variety of metres in rapid succession, and to negotiate the delicate transitions between them’ (Easterling & Hall, 6–7): Gods and slaves, for example, rarely sing lyrics in tragedy, but they do recite anapaests. Sophoclean leads all sing at moments of great emotion, female characters frequently sing, but middle-aged men in Aeschylus and Euripides (with the exception of distressed barbarians) prefer spoken rhetoric to extended lyrics. (Easterling & Hall, 7)

The vocal and physical demands on the ancient actor would have been quite extraordinary, given the linguistic and musical complexity they were working with, the spatial and acoustical negotiations required by a vast, open-air performance space (see Chap. 6), and the use of masks. There are complex debates about the tragic mask’s role and significance in the performance of Greek tragedy, and it is beyond the scope of the present

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volume to discuss how this ancient artefact may have focused attention on the actor’s voice, and the relationship between voice and body. Ancient vase paintings, such as the much-studied Pronomos vase (c.400 BCE),20 offer pictorial evidence of actors and masks in various enigmatic poses, and evidence a significant interrelationship between the mask and the actor. There are complex debates about the tragic mask’s role and significance, but the ancient actor would certainly have intoned text through this extra resonating membrane, listened to vibrations, and adjusted his voice and body accordingly. The mask also helped, from the spectator’s perspective, to distinguish the different characters on stage, functioning as a visual aid. David Wiles’ extensive study of the Greek tragic mask addresses its ancient meaning, function, and role, as well as its modern reception. The challenges modern performers face with the mask are many, as Wiles clearly states: ‘To wear a mask changes everything: one’s voice, one’s movement, one’s awareness of self and other’ (2007, 2).21 The discussion that follows moves on to address the contemporary performer, highlighting some key challenges associated with the work of enlivening and imagining text through sound, recovering (or re-­ imagining) the sonic richness of Greek tragedy, and exploring ways to generate an equivalent resonance or vibrancy in the embodied portrayal of tragic characters today. Some central questions this section will focus on are: • In what ways can modern translations of Greek tragedy provide a ‘performative equivalence’ (Griffiths) for ancient resonances and structures? • How do psychophysical processes make it possible for an actor to embody the sound and musical nuances embedded in the modernized text (responding to its ‘somatic promptings’)? • How does acting sound potentially  revitalize the experience of tragedy?

4.8   Acting Sound: The Challenges in Context For almost all actors in English-speaking countries, the texts of Greek tragedy are encountered through translation, a situation which gives rise to its own challenges and complexities:

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[…] what do we expect of translation in the theatre? Should the interpreter strive for word-for-word exactness or try to echo, in a more innovative fashion, the playwright’s intent and tone? Do we prefer the translation that’s most accurate or the one that’s most playable? That’s an even greater dilemma when it’s a verse play that needs adapting. Do you preserve the rhythm, the rhyme or the most literal sense? (Soloski 2009)

Soloski’s review of three translations by the poet Anne Carson (Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Orestes) highlights some of the vexed issues surrounding the translation of ancient Greek plays. The oft-quoted adage, Traduttore traditore (‘translator traitor’), is of little help when dealing with these issues because it invokes an ethics of fidelity in relation to the art of translating.22 In Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (2000), Wiles surveys different modern attempts to come to terms with the art of translation. For the French director Antoine Vitez, it comprises the art of tracing the ‘lost behaviour’ of dramatists, and the ‘birth’ of a new language (196); poet Ezra Pound mixed slang, Biblical sounding passages, and extracts from Greek, seeking equivalents to the complex sounds and meanings of the ancient form, and consequently embedding within his texts the kinds of musicality that prompt modern actors to think of themselves as dancers and musicians (148). Wiles’ discussion of the difficulties posed by Greek translation drives home several points, chief among them that authenticity is an illusion. There is no original score surviving, no full account of an ancient play’s lost music or physical life. And scholarly translations aspiring to grammatical or lexical purity do not necessarily lead to an actor-friendly performance-text (196–208). Goldhill argues that current translations variously fall into three categories: the voicings of poets, ‘who are committed to a vital language’ that recreates a sense of ancient tragic myth; versions by theatre-makers who seek a performable and therefore theatrically effective translation for a particular audience; and classicists ‘whose first commitment is to the Greek original’ (153–5; 184–7). Goldhill summarizes the challenges of translating, asserting that: ‘Greek tragedy is often difficult, dense, and highly poetic—a language modern theatre usually resists. There is always a difficult calculation to be made between losing the power of the ancient form and communicating with a modern audience’ (162). Translations which are attuned to naturalistic styles of acting may err towards a re-rendering of the Greek text which is streamlined, direct, comprehensible, and colloquial. By contrast, some

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modern poets such as Ted Hughes, Ann Carson, and Timberlake Wertenbaker opt to find commensurate sounds and registers which deliver the musical effect of tragic poetry, reminding actors of the staggering power of the tragic condition, but from a poetic vernacular that speaks closer to home.23 Moreover, the act (or art) of translation doesn’t happen in a cultural vacuum, as Lorna Hardwick argues: It is not possible simply to translate one word by its apparent verbal equivalent; the ‘letter’ is not enough. There is a complex web of tone, register and meaning which draws on the effects of vocabulary, sound, rhythm and metre in both the source text and the translation. This web is also shaped by the fact that translation is a movement which takes place not only across languages, but across time, place, beliefs and cultures (17).24

So there is a cultural politics, too, to choosing between alternative renderings of an ancient play.25 The local and contemporary resonances of particular words, phrases, and verses can transform the meaning and reception of an ancient play in subsequent performances, testing and re-­ testing the modern actor’s understanding of a play or role. Despite these layers of interpretative complexity, when actors read translations of Greek tragedy, they may detect a pace or pulse in the way the lines are constructed, and the punctuation arranged. Consider these two contrasting passages in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (c.429 BCE), which are spoken by the blind seer Tiresias. Both are translated by Kenneth McLeish, noted for his simple and direct accounts of classical plays. Observe the difference in lengths of phrases, punctuation, and rhythm, which conveys in the first, an accusatory and factual tone, indicting Oedipus, and in the second, a reinforcement of this accusation. The first extract is pointed and head-on, with careering images and irregular punctuation; the second has a more sustained pulse, similar phrase lengths, and presses down on the accusatory word ‘he’: Your father, your mother: Their curse will bring you darkness Where now there’s light, Will send you hurtling from Thebes, Headlong from Thebes. Where will they end, What hills won’t echo them, Your shrieks, howls… (trans. McLeish, 16)

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He thinks he’s a foreigner. He’s not. He’s a Theban, a native, and doesn’t know. He’s drowning. He sees, and he’ll be blind. He’s rich, he’ll be poor. A proud man, a beggar. (17)

Voice coach Catherine Weate advises that the process of acting such a passage should begin from ‘the grouping, connection and arrangement of words in dramatic text [which] defines the individual speech rhythm of a character’ (57). This view is applicable to the challenges of acting the sounds of Greek tragedy, and the exercises which follow will explore psychophysical ways to access this musical layer of text, proceeding from the notion that acting the musicality of Greek tragedy, even in modern translation, demands a vocally embodied response, and strongly implying that somatic (body-led) approaches are just as important as the imaginative probing of a character’s biographical details and motivations. To contextualize this point, it is worth taking a look at the work of three actors whose different approaches to Greek tragedy highlight the potentialities of psychophysical work. Laurence Olivier, in his 1946 Old Vic performance in Sophocles’ Oedipus, is remembered for the uniquely chilling scream he produced in the scene where Oedipus reveals his self-mutilation. In the play, Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his own culpability in murdering his father and marrying his mother. A messenger provides an account of this offstage mutilation, and then the chorus, accompanied by music, sing of the unsightly spectacle of their ruined king. And then Oedipus’ entrance follows: O, O where am I going? Where is my voice borne of the wind to and fro? Spirit, how far have you sprung? (trans. Grene, 55)

The horror of the truth which Oedipus discovers about himself plumbs a depth of human experience far beyond the norm, and it would be difficult for an actor to imagine such a psychological and physical state of being. The fact that in the text the king refers to his own voice highlights the sonic significance of this passage, which begins with the open-throated ‘O, O’. In preparing this moment, Olivier famously imagined the terrible scream of trapped ermines whose tongues become frozen to the ground

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(Holden).26 Olivier had trained at the (then) Central School of Speech and Drama, an institute which would have been familiar with  Stanislavski-­ based techniques, using memory and imagination  to evoke a physically vivid response in the actor.27 At the opposite end of the spectrum is the somatic performance of Sofia Michopoulou, who played Agave in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ production of Euripides’ Bacchae (Ancient Stadium of Delphi, 1986). In the play, Agave and her sisters, possessed by the intoxicating power of Dionysus, have killed and dismembered her son, Pentheus. Awakening from that ecstasy to a state of consciousness, she recognizes her nightmarish filicidal act. The actor playing Agave has to transition from a kind of out-of-­ body experience to consciousness, from an otherworldly or primal sound to one that has to formulate words, the mouth trying to make sense of what the eyes finally see—not a lion’s head, but her precious son’s. At this moment, Michopoulou produced a strange soundless scream. Hers was a totally body-centred approach that voided any sense of psychological acting and reached for a different kind of reality (Decreus, 287). Michopoulou has described how she experienced Agave as ‘a woman totally out of herself, a petrified human being going through the very limits of human existence’ (cited in Decreus, 286–7). Terzopoulos trains actors to attain a state of ecstatic reality, wherein ‘the performer’s body finds its way to another, energetically denser and more concentrated reality’ (287). Working with him, Michopoulou undertook long hours of preparation, with the aim of divesting the body and voice of personal emotions (acquired through a lifetime of enculturation), and producing instead a sound emanating from the body’s rhythms (286–7). This is a process which, unlike Olivier’s, eschewed psychological analysis and mimicry, and relied on the rhythm and motions of the entire body to generate a strange and otherworldly palette of sound. Between these two processes lies a convergence—or a balance of psychology and physicality. In her 1989 performance (for the Royal Shakespeare Company) of the character Electra, the Irish actress Fiona Shaw attempted to physically and vocally articulate the heroine’s emotional crisis, parts of which, in its ancient rendition, would have been sung. Shaw’s modern approach, devoid of song, could only generate, through speech, raw surges of emotions.28 This actor’s performances are known for their meticulous physical and emotional immersion in a role, and her long-­ standing collaboration with director Deborah Warner has resulted in a process which has allowed Shaw to deepen her craft through the playing of classical roles. Her Electra represented one of the milestones in that

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process, because it combined an actor’s voice and body attuned to the powerful poetry and lyricism of the ancient text with a highly individualized psychological excavation of the character of Electra. A post-show panel discussion offered an account of the challenges an actor playing such a role faces in context of the intrinsic musicality of the text. As Warner expressed it: ‘In opera, you cannot do an aria without singing it. You either sing it completely, or you don’t do it that day. That is exactly the same territory with Greek tragedy’. This is an idea reinforced by Shaw, who added: ‘Electra is unusual because it is written like some kind of emotional apotheosis’. To sustain a sense of ‘one raw wave of emotion on top of another’ required a balanced psychophysical approach, drawing both from a specific behavioural profile of Electra and a somatic engagement with Electra’s text. Shaw imagined Electra’s body as a ‘whirling dervish’ of energy, an embodied process that would enable her to journey from (as she put it) ‘spoken word to music, or to dance, or some other form that would allow this unbearable moment of human experience to be experienced’.29 One of the key principles in any discussion regarding the relationship of an actor’s thought and somatic physicality is an awareness of breath and breath control. All drama students at some point in analysing texts (especially poetic texts) will have been instructed in the importance of breathing. Breath may be structured to match with ‘caesuras’, or pauses in the line, often indicated by punctuation, although different patterns of pauses  may require different quantities and qualities of breath. Breath energizes the rhythms that propel vocalized text, and the way these rhythms rise and fall. Punctuation, phrasing, the openness of vowels, and the activity of consonants also require a strong awareness of breath through the body. Thoughts may be conveyed on and through discrete amounts of breath. Acting coaches have summed up the process in a formula: ‘A sentence equals a thought; a thought equals a breath, and therefore, a sentence equals a breath’ (Caldarone & Lloyd-Williams, xx; Panet, 154). Though, of course, the surviving (sometimes unreliable) fragments of ancient tragic plays don’t always scan neatly into breathable units of thought—a situation which can necessitate a certain amount of invention. Still, studying the use of breath can help to overcome the problematic in-your-head versus in-your-body contradiction that some actors experience during training. This psychophysical concept can be traced back to readings of Stanislavski and his work on Physical Action, as well as the

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notion of radiating energy (or prana, in yoga practice), which Stanislavski believed contributed to connecting mind and body (Daboo, 177).30 The use of breath can also induce holistic experiences, apparently dissolving boundaries between visual, aural, and physical senses. As Gutenkunst and Gillett demonstrate, the alignment of breath and text is important for the inner-outer dynamic of psychophysical work because ‘the breath carries the [inner] acting impulse on a wave through [outer] words and actions’ (107). Leading voice specialists also engage with the notion of a m ­ ind-­body continuum, which breath activates. Patsy Rodenburg and Kristin Linklater have highlighted in their work the significance of the body, reinforcing the fact that ‘when language is explored through the body, it evokes [its own] specific physical properties’, apart from the volition of the mind (Rodenburg, 167).31 In fact, the interrelationship of image, voice, body, and breath is so sensitized to soundings that an impulsive gesture, when accompanied with a phrase of text or music, may literally ‘resound’ with myriad images (Zinder, 157). Moni Yakim demonstrates how acting choices are endlessly generative when breath ‘ignites’ the imagination through the incorporation of units of vowels and consonants (Yakim 1993). And according to Gutekunst and Gillett, ‘vibrating sound through our whole body resonance connects us with our creative mind and communicates a subtlety in text and experience that goes beyond words and their literal meanings’ (151). The following studio provocations draw from integrative methods, which invite you to explore just how interrelated breath, image, voice, and body are, and how this knowledge can help support the contemporary actor’s explorations of ancient tragedy.

4.9   Acting Sound: From the Studio These exercises focus on voice and sound through the relationship of breath and text. In the context of Greek tragedy, these are applied to solo song moments, where speaking breaks into song (such as the shared passages of a kommos), or  where dialogue is compressed into a tightly knit exchange of lines (as in a stichomythia). A warm-up before any acting exercises, especially those involving voice, is an essential part of the process of awakening an actor’s sensitivity to rhythm, sound, and words. You may choose to follow the voice exercises you are used to, or consult a variety of current training systems.32 Most intensive vocal warm-ups will include stimulating muscle groups, stretching and grounding the body, and resonating the body and vocal sounds by patting, massaging, humming,

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chewing, and so on. The sense of being with your body, your muscles, and your breathing must be given time and space. Short exercises involving the safe and controlled sounding of vowels, consonants, and the inclusion of games to activate the imagination to support these exercises will also help the actor proceed through the provocations ahead. 1. Inspiring Breath Chapter 3 discussed how Stanislavski’s psychophysical principle prompts the contemporary actor to engage both somatic and cognitive creativity in the exploration of a role or play, and several contemporary actor-training approaches use breath as a bridge to the imagination. This first exercise draws mainly from Moni Yakim, whose work explores nature, animals, and objects to assist actors in creating character. The point about this exercise is simply to become aware of how breath ‘inspires’ (literally: to breathe into life) image and how this activates a somatic sense of text. Imagine, for instance, the titan Prometheus, fastened to a rock and immobile (in Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus, date uncertain). Read this excerpt, which conveys his unrelenting suffering: Bright light, swift-winged winds, springs of the rivers, numberless Laughter of the sea’s waves, earth, mother of all, and the all-seeing Circle of the sun: I call upon you to see what I, a God, suffer At the hands of Gods— See with what kind of torture Worn down I shall wrestle ten thousand Years of time— (trans. Grene, in Grene & Lattimore 143)

• Begin this exercise lying on your back, with knees bent, and feet flat to the floor. Allow time to let your pelvis and lower back adjust. If required, add a book or flat object behind your head to keep your neck comfortably level to the floor. • With the text you’ve just read in mind, imagine an element of nature (rain, wind, thunder, sunshine, fire storm, clouds, sea, etc.). Given that this extract refers to water or waves, let’s imagine choosing a tempestuous sea. Consider its size, its weight, its colours, its texture, how it moves. Give yourself a chance to settle on clear images of your imagined sea (a ‘Prometheus Sea’).

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• Now focus on one image of this sea, a wave perhaps. Send a breath to the image of the wave. You can simply blow the breath through your mouth. Imagine, each time you send the breath, how it feeds and develops your image: its size, its colours, its shape, its force. Observe the quality energy you are sending to the image, how fast or slow or sustained the breath is. (If it’s helpful, this exercise can be undertaken with support from another actor, who can re-read lines of text to you as you paint-breathe your image.) • Let go of the image for the time being, and return to observing your breath. Is it more animated or energized now? Does it feel heavier, lighter, or a mix of both? What has changed? • With this new sensation of breathing, return to the text. Read it with a sense of the breathing that was activated in this exercise (a little like putting a boat on water which has been churned up). • What differences do you observe between your initial reading of the text (when you thought about the meaning of the words), and this activated breathing which you’ve inspired with images? Is there a difference between reading and mentally responding to the text, and this somatic mode of working with an abstract image and breath? The general purpose of activating (or ‘inspiring’) image through breath, even on this very basic level, is to generate a base sensation from the body which awakens an embodied encounter with the text and gives the actor an experience to compare with an interpretive (intellectual) reading of a tragic play. 2. Focusing Breath By focusing on specific parts of the body and using these parts as a reference point for breathing, an actor can re-imagine breathing and sound-­ making. This exercise draws on notions of chakra points, or centres of energy in the body, which are used in meditations such as yoga. There are traditionally seven points which start from the tail bone and work their way to the top of the head, and these centres align with different emotional sensations.33 You don’t need to be adept in meditation practices to do this. The idea of chakras is used here only to provide positional points, and as a way of exploring how refocusing the breath to these different parts of the body can open up the possibility of imagining new sounds and sensations. For the purposes of this exercise, the focus will be on the navel (the

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lower torso), the heart (the chest), and the third-eye space between your two eyes (the forehead area). • This exercise invites you to focus on a single character from Greek tragedy. Begin by asking yourself from what area of the body your chosen character is likely to breathe. Where do you sense they get their energy? • On the basis that that Oedipus is a thinking kind of character, an actor may sense that his breathing comes mainly from the head. If Medea breathes from the navel, it may be because she has an earthy manner, or from the heart, because she expresses maternal strength. Athene (from Aeschylus’ Eumenides) may breathe from all three points, as a goddess radiating truths about power and justice. • Taking Medea (breathing from the heart) as an example, attempt this next activity in a standing position, with feet the width of your shoulders apart, and head and neck relaxed on your shoulders. Begin with a sense of where breathing happens most naturally for you, and slowly begin to include the chest space (where the heart is) in your inhaling and exhaling of breath. The purpose is not to completely transfer the sensation of breathing from the throat and face, but to include more and more of your chest space into the sensation of breathing. If choosing another character and different anchoring point, such as a navel or third-eye space, the process of bringing breath to this area is the same. • As you feel a connection to the character’s chakra point (for Medea, the ‘heart’ space), release a hum on an exhaled breath, identifying the heart space as the centre of this energy. From the heart, you are energizing the breath. There’s no need to worry about doing this ‘correctly’, but keep focusing on the interconnectedness between the image of the heart and your breathing. • After the ‘hum’, you might attempt an open vowel sound on the out breath (exhale), such as an ‘ah’, ‘ooh’, or ‘eeh’. Keep the heart space at the centre of your breathing process. • After humming and vocalizing on a vowel, sustain a single tone on the exhale of breath, again using an open vowel. Then, relax for a few minutes, letting go of the exercise. Observe the breath, what’s new about it? Scan your body. How does it feel in general? Where does the breath feel energized?  Perhaps an emotion

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or feeling is coming to the surface. Simply jot these things down for reflection. When you start to think about the psychological profile of your tragic character, you might also be somatically aware of their breathing; as you think about your character, you can also breathe them into life. 3. Breathing Text Building on the previous exercise, here is a textual extract where Medea speaks to the chorus of the injustice women have suffered in a world ruled by men. Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women Are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, We have bought a husband, we must accept him as Possessor of our body. (trans. Vellacott, 24)

• Review the sensation of breathing from the heart (chest). Without trying to identify an intention in Medea other than to speak these lines, let her words travel on your heart-centred breath. You can use the commas and periods to mark out where you need to breathe. • Relax for a few minutes, and note any emotions, feelings, or physical sensations that arise during your speaking of this passage. Does breathing from the heart prompt particular sensations or thoughts in context of this text? • Now try breathing from the navel (the lower torso), and utter the text again. Note any emotions, feelings, or physical sensations that arise this time. Is the quality of sound in the text different for the navel-breathing Medea? You may choose to explore several of these ‘breathing points’, in relation to different sections of text. How does concentrated breathing like this focus your attention on the sound or shape of the words and phrases? What possible emotions or feelings emerge when you connect to the text by breathing from a focused place? You can also explore a passage of text in pairs, breathing from different centres. Listen to each other and observe the difference in energy  and sound being conveyed through the text. (Exercise 6, ‘Relating Breath’, returns to and elaborates ideas of ‘relational breath’.)

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When you have mastered several of these breathing points, imagine how the complexity of a character such as Medea, Oedipus, or Electra can involve not only a set of character traits which you infer from reading, but also a set of different breathing sources which prompt complex responses from your body as it interacts with the text. 4. Speeding Breath Messenger speeches offer actors some of the most dramatic performance opportunities in Greek tragedy. And because the events they report occur offstage, their text is filled with images to excite the listener’s imagination,  as though they themselves were witness to them (see Chap. 5). This exercise borrows from Brigid Panet’s application of Laban’s notion of speed,34 and aims to alert the actor to the idea that breathing may occur at different speeds, and therefore affects the way we vocalize a text and interpret character. • Stand with feet apart and your jaw relaxed. Begin by blowing between or trilling your lips (that is, keeping your lips together and forcing air through so the lips vibrate) at a steady rate. Then, with each exhaled breath, start to vary the rate of speed. Your breath might suddenly rush out at great speed and then slow down at the end, or vice versa. The speed of your breath can also increase (and therefore intensify) in the middle of an exhalation. • Choose three lines, one from the beginning, one from the middle, and one from the end of a messenger speech.35 Ignoring for the time being any punctuation, say the words of each of the three lines while sustaining your breath at a constant and uninterrupted rate. • Then try the three lines again with the speed of the breath randomly changing in different parts of the line. There should be no psychological intention in your speaking of the text. The purpose here is to simply listen to the way your tone and pitch change on particular words or sets of words. What might these qualities of sound (and breath) indicate about the speaker’s circumstances, or inner state? If breath patterns are applied differently in the beginning, middle, and end of a messenger speech, could this give the listener a sense of a dramatic or emotional journey?

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When experimenting with different speeds, you may suddenly awaken a kind of momentum and excitement of thought, potentially giving you access to a somatic sense of a character’s experience. 5. Flying Breath Another fun way to approach this idea is to imagine your breath travelling through the lines of text as a kind of flying creature: an insect or bird, for instance. Consider how these animals fly: some are erratic and indirect in their flight, while others might have a more sustained direct flight. (Again, you may use this exercise to approach many different speeches from tragedy, though the characters of gadfly-stung Io in Prometheus Bound, or the hunted Orestes of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, may be particularly apt examples.) • Imagine blowing your breath into the air, tracing the flight pattern of an imaginary flying creature (fly, bird, wasp, butterfly—it’s your choice). Lip trill or blow a breath which traces the imaginary creature in the air, when it lands on an object, when it seems to dart from one location to another. • After you’ve spent some time with this exercise, you may decide to move your entire body in the space. Follow your breath’s flight pattern, without predetermining a map or path. Enjoy the playfulness of allowing the body to be led by the breath.  • Then, without thinking too much about it, begin to utter the lines of your chosen character, allowing the flow of your breath to be propelled by the flight pattern of the creature through space, and in turn, propelling your words forward. When your breath inhabits the energy of a frenetic fly or a soaring eagle, what happens to the sound of your words? What about inhabiting the energy of a swallow or a moth? How do such differences in speed, direction, and energy enliven your sensation of the text? How can you start to phrase the text outside the ‘flight path’ of logical thinking? Aeschylus’ text is full of images, and this sort of flying breath can enliven the imagination and physical reactivity of the body, in a way that mentally analysing Io’s or Orestes’ given circumstances often doesn’t.

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6. Relating Breath This exercise addresses a sense of ‘shared breathing’, or breathing in dialogue with others; a foundational process in ensemble work that can be found in several mind-body-centred practices or somatic methods. This example draws primarily from two sources, the UK-based work in Voic(e) motion taught by Guy Dartnell (2013),36 and Ali Hodge’s work on the intersubjective process of encounter, or relational acting (2013), which is influenced by the work of Włodzimierz Staniewski at the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices.37 • With a partner, stand facing each other, at about arm’s length. One actor takes a deep breath and lets out a simple tone on an open vowel (‘ah’ will do). Choose a sound that sits in a middle of your range (not so high or low that it strains your voice). You may also use a gesture when making this tone, such as an upward raising of arms, as though you are offering the sound to your partner. • Feel comfortable singing this tone, and make eye contact with the other actor who, in turn, should raise their arms (palms open) to receive your tone as you are singing it. Your partner should match your tone (and pitch), and share your sound for a moment. Once this sound transfer is made, you can stop singing, and the other actor sustains the tone you shared. • During the transfer of the tone, you can re-breathe your sound at any time. Your partner receiving the tone can also choose, in their own time, to alter it slightly. When they feel comfortable and in control (remembering to breathe again if necessary), the sound should be passed back to the first actor (repeating the previous process in reverse). This exercise can be performed in a circle, where the tone can be transferred around. It is interesting to observe how the initial sound transforms through a kind of ‘whispering’ game.  The simplicity and directness of this exercise instantly connects you with another actor (or ensemble). It can also be applied to scenes, particularly where two characters are in an impassioned exchange, such as when Orestes first encounters his sister in Euripides’ Electra. Orestes:  It’s all right. I won’t hurt you. Elektra:  Apollo, protect me. Save me. Orestes:  I harm only enemies. You’re safe.

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Elektra: Go away. Don’t touch me. You’ve no right— Orestes: No one on earth has more right than I. Elektra: You lurk in the bushes, you wear a sword—How dare you? Orestes: If you wait, and listen, I’ll tell you. Elektra: What else can I do? Don’t hurt me. Orestes: I’ve news of your brother. Elektra: Oh, wonderful! Is he alive, or dead? Orestes: The best news first: he’s alive. Elektra: God reward you for that. Orestes: God reward us both. (trans. McLeish, 11)

• Without analysing the text, utter these lines (or those from your chosen exchange) back and forth in a pair to get a sense of their rhythm. • Once this feels controlled, drop the text, and simply exhale the breath being used to express your individual lines. You and your partner should share breath, back and forth, just as though you were speaking to one another. • Progressing to the next step, add a tone on each line of breath, so now there is sound being vocalized between you. Once this feels controlled, go back to uttering the lines in full. These tightly knit set of lines are nearly evenly balanced to convey an empathetic bond between sister and brother. How does giving and receiving breath and sound potentially help establish such a bond? 7. Sounding the Kommos As discussed above, a kommos in Greek tragedy is when a song or passage of text is shared, often between a protagonist and the chorus. In pop concerts, or religious or ritual ceremonies, you may have experienced a similar exchange in what is called antiphonal singing—that is, when alternating musical phrases are sung between a singing group and a solo singer. It may be impractical during rehearsals to create a whole chorus, so in this exercise, one person may stand in for the chorus, opposite another solo actor.

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• Two actors read, in unison, any kommos passage (just a few lines to start with), and sense together the peaks and troughs in the breath and rhythms travelling from line to line. Once a shared sense of the text’s rhythm and shape has been established, drop the text and enjoy instead, in unison, the sensation of inhaling and exhaling the passage’s patterned breath. • Next, one actor should take up the breath of the protagonist, and the other of the chorus. The protagonist exhales their first line (without words) to the other actor, and the chorus actor responds by breathing out their line in return. Try to mirror your partner’s breathing when they exhale  their lines, as though you are trading back and forth the shared feeling of breath. • Once this feels comfortable, experiment with intoning a single note on each line (as with Exercise 6). • Finally, return to vocalizing the words, enjoying the flow of words between you, and listening to your shared sound and sense of breath. • You may, at any stage during this sequence, introduce a simple gesture or movement. This can help define and reinforce different ­qualities of breath, and strengthen the interrelationship between you and the other person. You may ask what meanings or feelings these gestures or movements convey. A protagonist and chorus, while speaking different lines, may nonetheless share a sense of what the other is breathing or intoning. This shared sense of breath and sound allows each person to mutually experience the other’s lines. Kommos passages often convey a deep and impassioned collective sense of empathy, and shared breath and sound (and inevitably movement) may lead you to harmonize with another character’s experience or emotions. It can also help you to engage with the energy of the other, so there is a vital sense of counterpoint in your exchanges as you explore tragedy’s characters and situations.

4.10   Acting Sound: Epilogue Vocal sound is a complex and vital aspect of an actor’s craft. In ancient Greek culture, the performance practice of singing poetry passed from archaic epic and religious ritual into Greek tragedy. Ancient dramatists composed their plays using metrical units that were deeply imbricated with cultural meanings, associated with funerals, marriages, and forms of ritual worship. The ancient performer undoubtedly spoke and sang the metres

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and rhythms of Athenian tragedy, understanding themselves to be a part of a complex singing-performance tradition. These ancient performers also intoned their words in a vast outdoor space. Their text had to carry through the elements, as it were, to move and affect a vast audience in a festival mood. In the fifth-century Theatre of Dionysus, the ancient actor would have had to utilize his entire body to project and sustain his speech and song, especially when shared with other actors or the chorus. Aristotle omits any commentary on voice production from his Poetics, engaging instead with tragedies as written artefacts. He and Plato, however, did advocate the technical mastery of music-making insofar as it provided moral education and reinforced good citizenship—a philosophy far removed from the voice-training ethos of most contemporary actors (Kapsali). The tragic text the modern actor (often silently) reads is derived from sophisticated musical traditions. Yet, today’s actor must necessarily encounter the text through modern translations created by poets, classicists, and other theatre-makers. These modern versions will call upon contemporary acting approaches, which are attuned to the inherent ­ rhythms and poetic lyricism of re-imagined tragic texts. At the same time, these versions are not without their cultural and political sedimentations. Comparing translations, evaluating their poetic resonance, theatricality and performative equivalence, allows the body and breath to take part in the reconstruction of the sonic potentiality of an ancient play. The Stanislavski-inspired actor may intellectually conceptualize a character’s needs and intentions, but any  analysis of tragedy also requires an aural sense of songful-ness, and an embodied sense of how to modulate from one rhythmic passage to the next. The contemporary actor, when working psychophysically, has to decide at what point combined vocal and physical exercises should enter  their preparatory character work. But it is clear that starting from a ‘round-the-­ table’ discussion of motivations and objectives does not serve the physical and embodied necessities of this ancient dramatic form. Playing Oedipus, Medea, Prometheus, Antigone, one of tragedy’s messengers, or the chorus demands from the outset an open-minded, open-bodied, and open-­ throated awareness of sound. Sound-making is a vital acting process for excavating the musical qualities and effects of a tragic text, specifically the way words are linked together like melodies, and the way images are composed to resonate in relation to sound and rhythm. This chapter has focused primarily on breath and text as a form of active exploration, which offers a different set of insights and potentials to traditional reading analysis. Such knowledge will hopefully invite you to develop your own

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imaginative approaches, drawing on the many vocal pedagogies currently embedded in contemporary somatic actor training. The following chapter will build upon these insights, highlighting some of the ways in which contemporary voicings of ancient texts can be used to explore tragedy’s unpredictable, multiple, and mythic narratives.

Notes 1. 21 August–13 September 2015 at the Malthouse, Melbourne, Australia. http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/antigone (viewed 20 February 2018). 2. The term ‘somatic’ from the Greek somatikòs, meaning ‘of the body’. Somatic practices are underpinned by the principles of a mind-body continuum, with breath as a major component of the practice. For somatic training, see Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s work on embodied somatic practices (Body-Mind Centering), www.bodymincentering.org. For applications to actor training, see Armory (2010). For current practice-led research on somatic actor training, see Kapadocha (2018). 3. This approach towards the two disciplines, emerging from a post-Wagnerian enthusiasm for holism in the arts, also reflected Stanislavski’s ideas about music and drama, whose laws he believed overlapped, and whose expressive elements, particularly tempos and rhythms, gave actors and singers the wherewithal to perform in a dramatically vital and credible way (Dunbar 2016, 63–4). 4. See further Stanislavski & Rumyantsev (1975). 5. See, for instance, Deer & Dal Vera (2008) and Harvard (2013). 6. Formal somatic voice work is also a more recent development within vocal pedagogy. See, for example, Jeanie LoVetri’s body-based method of vocal training: http://www.thevoiceworkshop.com/somatic.html (viewed 12 July 2018). 7. Though even readers of ancient Greek cannot know how the play sounded when it was first performed (Wiles 2000, 196). 8. See also Wiles (2007, 238–9). 9. For general reading on philosophical foundations of Greek music, see West (1992). 10. Plato’s Republic (III.399a–b, 400b–c; and Laws 668–73). 11. Damon, an ancient commentator on innovations in music during the fifth century BCE, made a systematic study of the political implications of music. See Wallace (266–7). 12. Connections between epic and tragedy are explored further in Chap. 5 (Acting Myth).

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13. The classic account of the Homeric poet as epic-singer can be found in Lord (150–4). 14. A modern equivalence may be demonstrated in Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s stage adaptation of The Odyssey, where references to the Peloponnesian War are re-contextualized in terms of current conflicts in Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Afghanistan (Harrop 2018, 265–6). 15. Not forgetting that tragedy drew its rhetorical tone from the law courts, and was perhaps also perceived as a political discourse. See, Wiles (2000, 52–65). 16. On the politics of lament see Foley (2001). 17. For a recent study of the development of monody in Greek tragedy, see Catenaccio (2017). 18. On the rise of the ancient ‘professional’ Greek and Roman actor, see Easterling & Hall (2002). 19. For a systematic study of the musical design of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ plays, see Scott (1984, 1996). 20. See Taplin & Wyles (2010). 21. A comprehensive study of the history and reception of the Greek mask can be found in Wiles (2007). 22. Some things do get lost in translation, arguably the most problematic being how to reify the ancient ritual cries of lament—from the Greek ototoi—to the modern keening of ‘ah’ or ‘oh’, to stylized phrases such as ‘woe is me’ or ‘ah me’ (Goldhill, 201). 23. Goldhill contributes a helpful comparison of different versions by modern poets and theatre-makers of Cassandra’s speech in Agamemnon. They highlight the different ways these translations tweak and calibrate the language of ‘ambiguity and allusiveness’ to meet the theatrical expectations of the audience (155–61). See also Wiles’ comparative examples (2000, 200–8). 24. Goldhill (168) adds: ‘Translations bring their own politics to the table’. Actors too bring their own sedimentation. As Griffiths argues, a character name such as Antigone comes heavily loaded with meaning. An actor ‘cannot come to the text without looking beside and skirting around the potential that lies within the name’ (2010, 227). 25. Morrison (2010), for example, discusses how some translators have sought an archaic style for Antigone’s choral ‘Ode to Man’ in Antigone, formally echoing the conservative sentiments of a chorus which celebrates a patriarchal world view (260). 26. See also Brantley (2001). 27. The fact that Olivier’s performance was part of a double bill in which, in the same night, he played the comedic Mr Puff, in Sheridan’s The Critic, is a testament to his vocal and acting craft. See Holden (1988).

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28. The first 90 lines were written by Sophocles to be sung (Wiles 2000, 162); see also Carson (1996). 29. The panel discussion, entitled ‘Complex Electra’, can be read in full via https://www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol5no3/trans02.html (viewed 15 February 2018). 30. Stanislavski’s final rehearsal techniques, as well as his yoga-based practices (see Chap. 3) paved the way for such contemporary approaches. Currently, pedagogies such as somatic training and Alexander Technique also help prepare an actor’s body and breath for richly sonorous Greek tragic text. 31. See also Fitzmaurice (1997). 32. Weate (2009) is particularly valuable in laying out the foundational work of warm-ups and preparation. 33. There are a number of books and online sources introducing the function and experience of chakras. For a current, practice-based account of yoga and actor training, see Hulton & Kapsali (2015). 34. Panet develops a streamlined system through Laban’s movement vocabulary. The notion of speed (or time) is enfolded into other Laban-based vocabularies of action: the ‘flow’ of movement, which can be either bound or free; ‘spatial pathways’, which can be either direct or flexible (the ‘fly’ exercise simulates this particular spatial principle). ‘Time’ can be sudden or sustained. And an intrinsic understanding of all these categories of movement is found in their relationship to force, weight, intensity, and strength (199–261). 35. Some particularly effective messenger speeches include the report of the young prince’s fate in Euripides’ Hippolytus, the ongoing account of the battle in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, and the second messenger’s vivid evocation of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ Bacchae. 36. A Lecoq-based integration of voice, sound production, text, and movement is explored in Steen & Dean (2009). 37. See also Ali Hodge’s website, available from: http://www.hodge-actortraining.co.uk/ (viewed 25 February 2018).

References Anderson, W. 1994, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece, Cornell University Press, New York. Armory, K.K. 2010, ‘Acting for the Twenty-first Century: A Somatic Approach to Contemporary Actor Training’, Perfformio, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 5–20. Brantley, B. 2001, ‘A Rending Scream That Spoke for All’, New York Times, viewed 10 March 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/theater/ theater-a-rending-scream-that-spoke-for-all.html.

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Caldarone, M. & Lloyd-Williams, M. 2004, Actions: The Actor’s Thesaurus, Nick Hern Books, London. Carnicke, S. & Rosen, D. 2014, ‘A Singer Prepares: Stanislavsky and Opera’, in A. White (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, Routledge, London, pp. 120–38. Carson, A. 1996, ‘Screaming in Translation: The Elektra of Sophocles’, in F.M.  Dunn (ed.), Sophocles’ Elektra in Performance, M und P verlag für Wissenschaft und forschung, Stuttgart, Germany, pp. 5–11. Catenaccio, C. 2017, ‘Monody and Dramatic Form in Late Euripides’, PhD thesis, viewed 10 March 2018, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:6t1g1jwsvk. Daboo, J.  2013, ‘Stanislavsky and the Psychophysical in Western Acting’, in P.  Zarrilli, J.  Daboo & R.  Loukes, Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process: Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 158–93. Dale, A.M. 1969, Collected Papers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dartnell, G. 2013, ‘“Voicemotion” Explained’, viewed 10 March 2018, https:// emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2013/10/voicemotion-explained. Decreus, F. 2012, ‘The Reptilian Brain and the Representation of the Female in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Bacchai’, Logeion: Α Journal of Ancient Theatre, vol. 2, pp. 284–303. Deer, J. & Dal Vera, R. 2008, Acting in Musical Theatre: A Comprehensive Course, Routledge, London. Dunbar, Z. 2016, ‘Stanislavski’s System in Musical Theatre Training: Anomalies of Acting Song’, Stanislavski Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 63–74. Easterling, P. & Hall, E. (eds). 2002, Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fitzmaurice, C. 1997, ‘Breathing is Meaning’ in M. Hampton & B. Acker (eds), The Vocal Vision, Applause Books, New York, pp. 247–54. Foley, H.P. 2001, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. Gillyanne, K. 2004, Singing and the Actor (2nd Edition), A & C Black, London. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Grene, D. & Lattimore, R. (eds). 1991, Aeschylus II (2nd Edition), University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Grene, D. (trans.). 1994, Sophocles: The Theban Plays, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Griffiths, J.M. 2010, ‘Acting Perspectives: The Phenomenology of Performance as a Route to Reception’, in E. Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 219–31.

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Griffiths, J.M. 2015, Sophocles: Antigone, Currency Press, Sydney. Gutekunst, C. & Gillett, J.  2014, Voice into Acting: Integrating Voice and the Stanislavski Approach, Bloomsbury, London. Hardwick, L. 2000, Translating Words, Translating Cultures, Duckworth, London. Harrop, S. 2010, ‘Physical Performance and the Languages of Translation’, in E.  Hall & S.  Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 232–40. Harrop, S. 2018, ‘Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance’, in F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison & C. Kenward (eds), Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 262–74. Harvard, P. 2013, Acting Through Song, Nick Hern, London. Herington, J. 1985, Poetry in Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, University of California Press, Berkeley. Hodge, A. 2013. Core Training for the Relational Actor, Routledge, Abingdon. Holden, A. 1988, Olivier, Macmillan, New York. Hulton, D. & Kapsali, M. 2015, Yoga and Actor Training, Routledge, Abingdon. Jones, H.-L. (trans.). 1994, Sophocles: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Kapadocha, C. 2018, ‘Somatic Acting Process’, viewed 20 February 2018. https://www.christinakapadocha.com/index.php?option=com_content&view =category&layout=blog&id=42&Itemid=96. Kapsali, M. 2014, ‘Training in a Cold Climate’, Theatre Dance and Performance Training, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 219–32. Kowalzig, B. 2004, ‘Changing Choral Worlds: Song-Dance and Society in Athens and Beyond’, in P. Murray & P. Wilson (eds), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousikê in the Classical Athenian City, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 39–66. Linklater, K. 2006, Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language, Nick Hern Books, London. Loraux, N. 2002, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, Cornell University Press, New York. Lord, A.B. 2003 [1960], The Singer of Tales (2nd edition), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. LoVetri, J. 2016, ‘Somatic Voicework’, viewed 12 July 2018, http://www.thevoiceworkshop.com/somatic.html. Lugering, M. 2013, The Expressive Actor: Integrated Voice, Movement and Acting Training (2nd Edition), Routledge, Abingdon. McLeish, K. (trans.). 2001, Sophocles: King Oedipus and Oedipus at Kolonos, Nick Hern Books, London. McLeish, K. (trans.). 2004, Euripides’ Elektra, Methuen, London.

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Morrison, B. 2010, ‘Translating Greek Drama for Performance’, in E.  Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 219–31. Panet, B. 2009, Essential Acting: A Practical Handbook for Actors, Teachers and Directors, Routledge, New York. Raphael, F. & McLeish, K. (trans.). 1991, Aeschylus Plays: One—Persians, Prometheus Bound, Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, Methuen, London. Renaud, L.T. 2014, ‘A Singer Prepares: Stanislavsky and Opera’, in R.A. White (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, Routledge, London, pp. 120–38. Rodenburg, P. 1993, The Need for Words: Voice and the Text, Methuen, London. Scott, W.C. 1984, Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater, University Press of New England, Hanover. Scott, W.C. 1996, Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater, University Press of New England, Hanover. Sifakis, G.M. 2001, ‘The Function and Significance of Music in Tragedy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, vol. 45, pp. 21–35. Soloski, A. 2009, ‘Greek Tragedies Lost in Anne Carson’s Translation’, The Guardian, viewed 10 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ theatreblog/2009/apr/27/greek-tragedies-anne-carson-translation. Stanislavski, C. & Rumyantsev, P.I. 1975, Stanislavski on Opera, Theatre Arts Books, New York. Steen, R. & Dean, J. 2009, ‘What We May Be: The Integration of Lecoq Movement and George Voice Work at the RSAMD’, viewed 10 March 2018, https:// www.rcs.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/What_We_May_Be_article. pdf. Taplin, O. & Wyles, R. (eds). 2010, The Pronomos Vase and Its Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Vellacott, P. (trans.). 1963, Euripides: Medea and Other Plays, Penguin, London. Wallace, R.W. 2004, ‘Damon of OA’, in P. Murray & P. Wilson (eds), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousikê in the Classical Athenian City, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 249–68. Weate, C. 2009, Classic Voice: Working with Actors on Vocal Style, Oberon Books, London. West, M.L. 1981, ‘The Singing of Homer and the Modes of Early Greek Music’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 101, pp. 113–29. West, M.L. 1992, Ancient Greek Music, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Wheelwright, P. 1960, The Presocractics, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis. Wiles, D. 2000, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2003, A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Wiles, D. 2007, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Yakim, M. 1993, Creating a Character: A Physical Approach to Acting, Applause, New York. Zinder, D. 2013, Body Voice Image: Imagework Training and the Chekhov Technique, Taylor and Francis, New Jersey.

CHAPTER 5

Acting Myth

5.1   From the Auditorium: Why Don’t You Let Yourself Go? The first of them creeps into the palace, scared, laughingly thrilled with their own daring. The dark stage fills with more stealthy figures, near-naked, bald, holding hands, tiptoeing through the shadows. Growing in confidence, they begin to take possession of the space. They climb ladders, fetch down long ballet skirts, and dress themselves, grinning sheepishly at the audience, or preening; half ironic, half bold. One of them flashes his bare backside at an offstage crowd. The Bacchae are breaking into Pentheus’ palace. The chorus are stealing the show. They’re not meant to be here. This isn’t how the play usually starts. Whatever’s going on in the opening moments of Kneehigh’s Bacchae is … illicit, forbidden, naughty. Later, this gang of giggling trespassers will try to explain what’s going on. In the received text of Euripides’ Bacchae, this material is spoken by the god Dionysus in a self-assertive prologue authoritatively proclaiming his heritage and divinity. In this gleefully rule-breaking adaptation, Craig Johnson’s beer-bellied, sharp-eyed Coryphaeus (chorus leader) translates for an imperious, Hungarian-speaking Dionysus (Róbert Lucskay), comically rebuking the audience for not keeping up: Oh dear! He can see from the looks on your faces That you’re unfamiliar with Greek deities

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Pay attention! You have to listen! There’s some very complicated exposition. (Grose, Murphy & Rice, 76) In characteristic Kneehigh style, the chorus give us the back-story instead, their storytelling theatre aesthetic making light work of the promised ‘exposition’. They waft their thyrsi (ritual staffs wound with ivy and leaves—here made from Pentheus’ torn-up morning papers) to illustrate the play’s mythic geography. They wheel out a blackboard and start sketching Dionysus’ family tree (76–80). They talk to the audience directly, checking we’re keeping up, making jokes, improvising, taking the piss out of themselves, and us. For some spectators, this is uncomfortably childish stuff. The twentieth century’s dominant realist aesthetic associates this kind of direct audience address—broad, metatheatrical, slapstick-infused, jokey (and, in this instance, definitely blokey)—with children’s theatre, or with the peculiar theatrical license of the popular Christmas pantomime.1 In fact, Kneehigh did begin as a children’s theatre company, making work in local and community spaces around Cornwall in the 1980s (Radosavljević 2013, 72–5), a heritage which some critics have used to disparage the company’s later work. But I love their chatty self-confidence, their delight in accosting their audience, the way they revel in the risky business of re-telling old stories in new ways. In her introduction to the published text of The Bacchae, director Emma Rice describes the company’s work in precisely these terms: ‘We have been telling stories for twenty-five years’ (Grose, Murphy & Rice, 11). But this emphasis on re-telling isn’t about repetition, or reverence. According to Rice, the company’s devising and rehearsal process aims both ‘to serve’ and to ‘subvert’ the stories they collectively re-imagine (13), demanding that their audiences also ‘join in with the game’ (12). The chorus’ ruthless re-­shaping of Pentheus’ newspapers gives theatrical embodiment to the company’s view that official versions of potent narratives can always be torn up, or transformed. Even screwed up and thrown at someone in the second row (90). As Cadmus and Tiresias head for the mountain, the chorus’ blackboard re-­ appears, now scrawled with lyrics, together with an announcement calculated to bring any serious British theatregoer out in a cold sweat: Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re going to get this party Started with a bang, and a good old-fashioned sing-along (85)

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‘Why does it matter? /Why don’t you let yourself go?’ the chorus sing, and the audience—suspended somewhere between hilarity and terror—sing with them (85). And, paradoxically, this is where this Bacchae really begins to show its teeth. Kneehigh’s playful, storytelling theatre aesthetic invites its watchers to imaginatively collude in the company’s world-view, all the while insisting that this is just a jolly, slightly daft, bit of fooling. In a radio essay, Rice describes her desire to ‘coax my audience into a simpler state, and tempt them to respond to work in a childlike way’, crafting an experience that encourages ‘instinctive’ rather than intellectual responses (2012). In the audience, I laugh, I sing, beginning to enjoy my own foolishness—and so I’m disarmed. I’m defenceless against the play’s sudden, sickening twist of mood, its descent into too-real violence, blood, and irrational rage. Like Pentheus, in Kneehigh’s adaptation (94–5), I’ve been seduced and snared by a game. The show’s audience have helped make this world, this story, this catastrophe. Now, individually and collectively, we have to own the consequences.

5.2   Acting Myth: An Introduction To act in a Greek tragedy is always to engage in the re-performance of a story which has been told before. Many, many times. Even in the Athens of the fifth century BCE, the stories staged were familiar ones, drawn from extant historical, mythic, and heroic narratives. And the line between these categories could be fluidly drawn, in a city stubbornly attached to the notion that its first king had been the serpent-tailed foster-child of the goddess Athene, born out of the Attic earth. The surviving tragic canon gives clues about some of the key narrative groupings within fifth-century tragic playwriting. Most obviously, there are the stories of the Trojan War, its ominous preliminaries, and its grim fallout, tales famous to fifth-­century Greece through Homer’s epic poems. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes, Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, Trojan Women, Hecuba, Andromache and (drawing on the historian Herodotus and lyric poet Stesichorus, as well as Homer) Helen all fall into this broad category, as does the unattributed Rhesus. The three plays focusing on Electra (Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, and eponymous dramas by Sophocles and Euripides) can be viewed as offshoots of this theme, as can Euripides’ Orestes and Iphigenia at Tauris. Another group of tragedies centre upon the royal house of Thebes: Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles’

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Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus,2 together with Euripides’ Phoenician Women, and perhaps (at a stretch), Bacchae. Less familiar today are a corpus of plays about the travails and triumphs of the demi-god Heracles, including Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, along with Euripides’ Heracles, The Children of Heracles, and Alcestis. A play customarily attributed to Aeschylus’, Prometheus Bound, also heralds the (as yet unborn) hero’s birth and feats. There are additionally a scattering of surviving plays which deal with Athens’ mythic kings and their relatives (Euripides’ The Suppliants, Hippolytus, and Ion) or which mythologize the city’s more recent, historical triumphs (Aeschylus’ Persians). The fourth-century comic playwright Antiphanes griped that tragic writers had things easier than their comic counterparts, since the stories they dramatized already existed. However, this doesn’t mean the mythically inspired plays of the fifth century BCE were either predictable or boring. Far from it. In fact, the mythic and heroic narratives from which tragic playwrights borrowed could be re-interpreted and re-made as each occasion of performance demanded. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458 BCE), Helen is depicted as a wanton war-bringer, the worst of women, a savage contrast to the pitiful heroism of the virgin Iphigenia, as recalled by the play’s chorus. Yet, in Euripides’ Helen (412 BCE), the same character is startlingly re-figured as a faithful wife, fending off unwelcome suitors while waiting for her husband’s return from Troy, where (as she points out in the play’s prologue) she never went in the first place: Then Zeus took a hand, stirred up war Between Greece and Troy. Two reasons: To cull the human race (his private reason); To discover the greatest hero in Greece (His official reason). It wasn’t my fault. The Greeks said they were fighting Troy for me, But I wasn’t even there. (trans. McLeish in Walton & McLeish 1997a, 50)

As Helen’s prologue demonstrates, when Athenian tragedy re-wrote and re-performed old stories, it was not in a spirit of reverent repetition, but of lively and provocative revisionism, with new perspectives on ancient myths ‘keeping the stories and their characters vigorously alive’ (Johnston, 309).

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5.3   Re-making Myth Some scholars have interpreted tragedy’s re-making of pre-existing narratives in political terms, considering how such re-shaping of earlier myths may have supported the city’s radical experiment in participatory democracy. Athenian tragedy pre-dates the city’s adoption of democracy, but not by many decades, and (as Paul Cartledge has argued) the civic festival of the Great Dionysia may have been the celebratory creation of the brand-­ new, democratic, city-state.3 According to this analysis, mythic tales were re-interpreted within Athenian tragedy in order to address the anxieties and self-fashioning of the still relatively new democratic polis. Sophocles’ Ajax (perhaps written around 440 BCE), which centres upon the final hours of a mighty Homeric warrior, is a good example. In the Iliad, Ajax is a prominent, heroic presence within the Greek military forces. Among other exploits, he fights a day-long duel with Trojan prince Hector at the end of which the two exchange friendship and rich gifts (book 7),  and almost single-handedly defends the Greek ships from a night assault (book 15). However, by the fifth century, warfare had changed, with the singular heroics of the Iliad giving way to disciplined, close-formation fighting as part of a phalanx (a tight-packed body of soldiers, all moving together), or to the collective endeavour of rowing triremes (swift warships with three rows of oars, and the basis of Athens’ naval supremacy). Now, the kind of solo heroics attributed to the Homeric Ajax could be lethally inappropriate in combat, as well as running counter to Athens’ democratic emphasis on the individual’s subordination to the needs and demands of the city. And so, the hero Ajax becomes, in Sophocles’ tragedy, a dangerously excessive figure; a clear and present risk to his supposed allies, too concerned with his own fame (the Homeric Greek term is kleos) to listen to reasonable counsel, or to consider the welfare of those who depend upon him. Expanding upon a narrative hinted at in the Odyssey, the play depicts Ajax as murderously jealous when he is denied the armour of dead Achilles. Determined to kill the men who have humiliated him, Ajax is driven mad by the gods, and slaughters livestock instead of his intended victims, finally committing suicide by falling on the sword he was given by Hector. The tragedy Ajax elaborates upon an inherited epic narrative in order to create a suspenseful and deeply moving new drama, which problematizes inherited notions of the individual, self-willed hero, while ultimately endorsing democratic civic ethics (Goldhill 1986, 144–6). Matthew Clark defines myth as ‘a traditional story that speaks to issues in the culture in which it

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is told’ (2), and Athenian tragedy was capable of actively re-shaping the city’s inherited myths in order to reflect upon the political and social challenges of democratic living. Rather than creating stand-alone imaginative creations, the job of the tragic playwright was to enrich and expand well-known narratives by creating: […] sequels, prequels, midquels (previously unnarrated episodes from the middles of established stories), and paraquels (previously unnarrated stories that take place at the same time as an established story but that focus on different characters, some of whom may have already appeared in more minor roles in the established story). (Johnston, 298)

In ‘The Greek Mythic Storyworld’, Sarah Iles Johnston uses the term ‘hyperserials’ to describe the network of interconnected narrative strands which ancient writers were able to spin on the basis of their inherited myths, meaning that each ‘individual’s story can be enjoyed on its own, but it is more resonant, credible, and just plain interesting as part of the bigger picture that is always shimmering behind it’ (298). Current popular culture is dominated by a series of phenomenally successful ­‘hyperserials’, often emerging from sci-fi and/or fantasy genres, major examples of which include Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, as well as works featuring DC or Marvel Comics’ pantheons of superheroes. As fans of any of the franchises just cited will attest, the multiple (and multimedia) outputs associated with each brand can both fascinate and infuriate their dedicated followers, as established or ‘canonical’ narratives are re-written, re-cast, and re-interpreted in response to changing cultural contexts. It’s possible to think of Athens’ playwrights operating in similar ways, experimenting with new approaches to the challenge of expanding or re-visioning a familiar body of myths, displaying their individual poetic skill by opening up novel narrative vistas. This was a theatrical culture rich in adaptations, re-visions, and counterfactuals; an imaginative space in which the most familiar mythic story might suddenly be made strange by the innovations and plot-twists presented by a succession of tragic playwrights. And these multiple re-­makings of archaic myth were produced by a diverse body of theatrical poets. As Matthew Wright crucially observes: Classical Athens teemed with tragedians. Apart from the famous triad, there were many other playwrights who produced tragedies in Athens and

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elsewhere […] During their own times many of these lost writers were prominent and successful figures. They were selected to compete in the major festivals and often won prizes; they were famous enough to be the subject of topical jokes and parodies in contemporary comedy; they were important figures in contemporary cultural life. (xiii–xiv)

As Chap. 2 has already outlined, the Lycurgan canon established in the fourth century BCE ‘radically pruned down and repackaged’ the tragic output of the previous century (Wright, xviii), focusing attention on the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to the exclusion of other, once equally famous, names. The material difficulty of preserving and transmitting manuscripts also accounts for the loss of many works. But it’s important to remember that the surviving canon of Greek tragedy contains only 32 whole plays, ‘out of a total that must have run into the hundreds or even thousands’ (xix). Even the most diligent modern scholar can only access a fraction of the narrative variants potentially at play within the theatrical ecosystem of fifth-century Athens. As Wright outlines: The surviving versions of these myths, in tragedy and elsewhere, can seem to represent the ‘definitive’ version, but it is clear that things were not so simple. There were multiple versions of these stories—not just because the mythic tradition was unusually capacious and full of contradictions and variants, but because each new […] dramatic version presented an opportunity for the poet to re-examine the myth and bring his own perspective or new twist on it. (202)

Each tragic drama came into existence in relation to—and perhaps in creative tension with—many other versions of the same story. Encountering surviving tragedies today, it’s vital to remember that these apparently stand-alone tales actually emerged from a complex network of mythic variables, a background which informs their narrative strategies and (in consequence) the peculiar challenges they pose as texts for performance.

5.4   Epic Moments The artistic practice of re-making mythic narratives was much older than either democracy or tragedy. As has already been indicated, the epic poems attributed to Homer, which narrate portions of the semi-mythic Trojan War (the Iliad) and the homecoming of its Greek victors (the Odyssey),

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emerged from an archaic story culture in which written texts and sung/ spoken oral performances interacted and combined to create an extended, flexible, and permanently shifting body of shared myth (Foley 1999, xiv, 2005, 206) from which a poet could select—and imaginatively transform—portions as different circumstances required (Foley 2005, 204; Martin, 17–18).4 Scholarly opinion as to when and where the Homeric epics were first written down in their current form varies,5 but there is no doubt that these (and other) extended, heroic poems of war, grief, atrocity, and homecoming provided fifth-century tragic writers with a rich body of narrative material from which they could excerpt and extrapolate their own takes on culturally loaded stories and characters. And the widespread popularity of Homeric tales and tropes made it possible for these later playwrights to bring a knowing intertextuality (both dramatic and playful in intent) to their handing of these old myths. Tragedy also owed a formal debt to Homeric epic, and its associated performance practices. Homeric epic rarely follows a sequential chronology, instead beginning part-way through the action, and looping or leaping backwards and forwards in time to draw temporally distant experiences and acts into the mesh of the unfolding narrative (Scodel 2004, 46–7; 49). The hero of the Odyssey, for example, is repeatedly moved to helpless tears by the performances of a blind bard (Book 8, 75–95; 495–535) whose songs conjure painful memories of the campaign against Troy, simultaneously providing the epic’s listeners with a vivid reminder of the events which have caused Odysseus to be absent from Ithaca. In the same way, the narrative speeches of tragedy allow characters and choruses to summon up events or acts which took place long ago, or far away, allowing tragedy’s theatrical storytellers to transcend the limited locale and timeframe conventionally adopted in fifth-century dramaturgy, while perhaps also seeking to rival the powerful imaginative effects of epic’s poetic narrations. By the fifth century BCE, oral practices of re-shaping the heroic songs each time they were sung (Scodel 2004, 45–6) had given way to a new format: the competitive recitation of officially compiled versions of Homer’s epics (Jensen, 52–3, 2017, 11). But the task of moving an audience to strong emotional responses through the re-articulation of an extended narrative remained central to the art of the reciter (rhapsode). In the philosophical dialogue known as Ion, Plato methodically dismantles such a performer’s claims to being a knowledgeable interpreter of Homeric verses, insisting that the effectiveness of the rhapsode’s work can only be

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attributed to divine possession. Reading against the grain of Plato’s cross-­ examination, however, reveals some tantalizing details concerning epic performances around the end of the fifth century. The philosopher inquires: ‘And does your soul, in its enthusiasm, imagine that it is present at those events which you describe, whether in Ithaca or in Troy or wherever the epic sets the scene?’6 This disingenuous question prompts Ion’s famous reply that: ‘When I recite something pitiful my eyes fill with tears; when it’s something terrifying or dreadful my hair stands on end in terror and my heart thumps’ (535b–c). The rhapsode does not imagine himself to be a personage within the action of an epic, but instead positions himself as an imaginatively sensitive observer of these. Ion assents to Plato’s proposition that the effects of epic performance stem from a performer’s ability to imagine himself witnessing the situation he describes. The performer then transmits his own response to a listening audience through a combination of vivid description (535b) and the embodiment of sympathetic emotional states. Yet, Ion also suggests that such intense moments of performance were supported by a detailed awareness of audience reactions—‘it’s very important that I pay attention to them’ (535e)—suggesting that part of the rhapsode’s art was the ability to negotiate fluently between intense engagement with the imagined world of a heroic or mythic story, and a pragmatic alertness to the unfolding present of each live performance. Ion’s awareness of his audience’s reaction to an unfolding narrative in performance is, in Plato’s dialogue, framed as discreditable revelation, as the self-proclaimed disciple of Homer unwittingly reveals himself to be driven by baser motives, ‘since if I make them cry, I shall be laughing at the money I’ll make, but if I make them laugh, I’ll be the one crying because of the money I’ll lose’ (535e). However, modern studies of oral epic performance offer an alternative angle from which to understand Ion’s comments, suggesting that a sustained focus on audience response is one of the key skills of delivering solo performances of extended stories successfully. Minna Skafte Jensen highlights the importance of ‘face-to-­ face’ contexts for the successful (re)creation and performance of epic narratives: The success of a singer depends on his ability to catch the interest of his audience and keep it. He is intent on meeting their demands and is all the time attentive to their reactions. […] The more often he performs the same narrative, the better he knows what will make people laugh or cry, and the

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experienced singer is skilled at manipulating the feelings of his audience. (2005, 46–7)

Neither Ion’s art (the recitation of fixed poetic texts) nor the scripted performances of Athens’ tragic actors called for this intense degree of audience responsiveness, and neither offered their practitioners the traditional epic-singer’s freedom of adapting an extant story in the course of a performance. Yet it may be that tragedy’s extended narratives, i­ ncorporating tropes inherited or borrowed from performances of epic,7 demanded a similar dual focus from their performers. In what might be called tragedy’s ‘epic moments’, ancient actors were required to modulate fluidly between intense personal imagining, and an attentive awareness of their co-present audience, to ensure that the specific narrative twists of each play were fully articulated and absorbed.8

5.5   Performing ‘Strange Alternatives’ Tragedy’s unpredictable narratives were often conveyed through extended solo speeches, delivered either by a tragedy’s protagonists, or by their servants, slaves, or other witnesses of key acts, whose ‘messenger’ speeches represent some of the genre’s most intense acting challenges. Such long solo speeches could be directed in part, or wholly, at a play’s audience. Here, for example, is Deianeira, the wife of Heracles, at the opening of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis: People say—and they have been repeating this for ages— That you’ll never know for sure whether your life Is good or bad until it ends in death. That’s the human way. But not for me, not for my life. No need to go down To Hades. I know it now. My life is heavy with the weight Of sorrow.

She goes on to lament her perilous girlhood, when she was menaced by a monstrous, shape-shifting suitor, and only narrowly rescued by the fortuitous arrival of Heracles. However: […] Now I am yoked to Heracles As his chosen bedmate, and I feed upon fear For him, in constant anxiety. Each night brings on

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The pain, and the next night takes it and sends it away. Then we had children, and he, for goodness’ sake, Was like a farmer who has a remote field, That he sees once a seed time and again at harvest. The man had that sort of career—it sent him home, And then away from home, in constant service to Someone. And now that he’s come through these tests at last I am more tormented than ever. (trans. Woodruff in Meineck & Woodruff 2007, 65–6)

Modern editions of this play conventionally add a stage direction to the effect that Deianeira’s nurse should accompany her onstage. However, this figure does not actually speak until 50 lines later, and there seems little dramatic necessity for Deianeira to re-capitulate her personal history and current anxieties to a long-standing member of her household. It’s probable that, in its earliest performance contexts, this speech would have been addressed directly to the play’s audience (clearly visible in the shared sunlight of an open-air performance),9 giving them a swift account of where they stand in relation to the extant mythic corpus surrounding Heracles, and providing clues about where this particular addition to the canon was heading.10 Heracles is the demi-god son of Zeus and Alcmene, famous for his immense physical strength, but hated by Zeus’ wife Hera, and so forced to undertake a series of labours in the service of a mortal king, Eurystheus. Women of Trachis (date uncertain) dramatizes the end of Heracles’ mortal life, and his accidental death at the hands of his wife; Deianeira believes she’s anointing his clothes with a love potion, but it poisons him, causing the hero such bodily anguish that he demands to be burned, still living, on his funeral pyre. So a watching audience would need to be reminded of related stories (Heracles’ monster-slaying, his labours, his enthusiastic pursuit of extra-marital sexual conquests) in order to locate, anticipate, and finally understand the particular choices Deianeira and Heracles make in this late episode of the hero’s story. The narrative speeches in which tragedy’s characters and choruses may have addressed their audience directly (a notion explored further below) provide a vital means of locating a given episode in relation to a wider body of myth, allowing each fifth-century playwright’s innovations and interpolations to be understood (and adjudged) in the context of the established ‘canon’. To add to the tension, most new tragedies would be performed only once, in the high-stakes environment of the Great Dionysia’s official

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festival. Tony Harrison, the Leeds-born poet and playwright who has himself written Greek-inspired dramas for one-off performances, describes this practice as ‘an almost reckless encounter with the inexorability of transience’ (2002, 185), but also proposes that the unrepeatability of such theatrical moments can generate a particular intensity of experience for both performers and audiences. In the Theatre of Dionysus, poets and acting companies had one chance to articulate the unique narrative twists of their re-told tale, and spectators had only one opportunity to grasp and interpret all the complexities of a new tragic drama. Modern audiences (primed by lectures on Aristotle) often associate attending performances of tragedy with the comfortable certainty of seeing a familiar narrative pattern (hubris, nemesis, catharsis) played out. But, for a fifth-century Athenian audience, suspense, surprise, and unpredictability were central to the pleasures of tragic theatregoing. In the Theatre of Dionysus, tragic myth was not a fixed corpus of agreed truths, but a tangle of competing— even contradictory—stories, which (in the hands of a skilful dramatist and actors) might shock, provoke, anger, or thrill their gathered audiences in unprecedented ways. Euripides’ choruses are fond of remarking on the unreliability of reason, or logical expectation, in relation to tragedy’s narratives. Here’s what they have to say at the end of the play Andromache (c.425 BCE), which springs several big surprises of its own: The gods have many ways to shape man’s destiny. They twist its pattern to surprising ends. What our reason said would happen—fails and we are given strange alternatives. (trans. Cannon in Walton & McLeish 1997b, 62)

For a fifth-century theatregoer, such ‘strange alternatives’ were always possible, disrupting or derailing age-old stories, dragging a play which initially looked comfortingly familiar into difficult or delightful new territories. And the tragic actor was often required to perform the role of skilled theatrical storyteller, making long narrative speeches vivid and engaging for an audience highly attuned to the many, twisty routes a given drama might potentially take. For many contemporary performers of Greek plays, though, this sense of tragedy’s mythic multiplicity, its playfulness in relation to a sprawling complex of possible narrative choices, and the actor’s need to negotiate between playing their allotted character

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role(s), and acting as a skilled theatrical storyteller, has been lost. So the rest of this chapter sets out to rediscover tragedy’s delight in defying expectations, talking to its audience, and re-making old narratives in fresh new ways. Key Questions: • How can the modern actor tackle extended narrative passages, focusing on the vivid evocation of unseen events or acts? • How can the present-day performer of tragedy move fluently between being ‘in role’ and acting as a ‘theatrical storyteller’? • How can today’s actors restore tension and unpredictability to tragic speeches which were (in their earliest performance contexts) often surprising, irreverent, and subversive of audience expectations?

5.6   Acting Myth: The Challenges in Context For many contemporary actors, talking to an audience is one the scariest things they can be asked to do. The rise of theatrical realism, with stage sets designed to resemble real-life environments and separated from darkened auditoria by an invisible ‘fourth wall’,11 has tended to increase this anxiety. In Stanislavski’s account of the early stages of actor training, an unexpected encounter with the audience’s space marks one of the most traumatic experiences for inexperienced student/narrator Kostya: ‘As soon as I stepped onto the acting area I was confronted by the gaping hole of the proscenium arch and beyond it a boundless, deep, dark void’ (Benedetti 2008, 9). In response to this consuming anxiety, director Tortsov teaches his students that ‘to divert your attention from the auditorium you must become engrossed in what is happening onstage’ (90). He trains them using a series of exercises based on ‘circles of attention’ (90–106), restricting students first to an area of focus based upon their own personal space, then the limits of a fictional ‘room’ defined by stage furniture and properties. The most intimate ‘circle of attention’ becomes a safe space for the trainee actor, where they can ‘forget the fact that in the darkness on every side, many strange eyes are watching you’ (98–9). This deliberately delimited space, carefully denying the presence of a theatre audience, allows the performer to achieve a paradoxical state of ‘public solitude’ (99).

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This section of An Actor’s Work highlights a couple of major problems in applying such realist acting techniques to Greek tragedy. Not only, as leading British actress Claire Higgins observes, is tragedy almost entirely lacking in familiar, everyday props, allowing actors ‘no chairs and no telephones’ with which to anchor their performances (Goldhill 2007, 82),12 but—as in the case of Sophocles’ Deianeira—it also repeatedly calls for actors to deliver long solo speeches which may be  directed wholly, or in part, at the audience. In speeches like these, many actors’ first instinct is to try to come up with a realistic pretext for the character’s speech (a desire which modern editors’ frequent stipulations about the presence of unspeaking listeners both recognizes, and supports). A Deianeira who’s speaking to her nurse, for instance, has the opportunity to establish a limited ‘circle of attention’ onstage, avoiding the perceived dangers of talking directly to her audience. In How To Stage Greek Tragedy Today (2007), Simon Goldhill seems to endorse such an approach,13 arguing that an extended narrative speech (he’s specifically discussing tragedy’s messengers) ‘needs a performance style that integrates the scene into the play as a whole’ (101), which can be achieved by an actor focusing on Stanislavski-­ inspired ‘Given Circumstances’ (Benedetti 2008, 52–4) especially as identified through their character’s interactions with onstage listeners (Goldhill 2007, 101).14 But maybe this avoidance of direct audience address is a missed opportunity. Talking to the audience may be exactly what Greek tragedy’s extended narrative speeches are inviting the modern actor to do, and maybe engaging with this challenge directly can help generate new approaches to the re-performance of ancient plays. In Talking to the Audience (2005), which examines direct address in relation to contemporary performances of Shakespeare, Bridget Escolme observes that some characters ‘appear to have theatrical intentions’ (41) and a ‘point of attention’ which extends beyond the fictional world of the stage, into the world of the audience (42). Such speeches, she argues, cannot be contained within a drama’s fictional world, because they have a ‘performance objective’ (39). Escolme’s discussion contests contemporary assumptions, often derived from Stanislavski’s teachings, that an actor’s major concern should be with a series of ‘Tasks’ aimed at achieving the particular desires of her character within the imagined world of the drama (Benedetti 2008, 142–51).15 Instead, she proposes that an actor in a non-realist play (her exemplar is Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida) may

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instead be required to explore a range of ‘performance objectives’, such as making her audience laugh, or encouraging them to feel that she and they are in a relationship of knowing complicity. The point is not simply that an actor can switch in and out of character for comic effect (Escolme, 41), but rather that certain characters in classical plays appear to be conscious of their ‘theatrical’ as well as their ‘onstage’ audiences, and may have ‘objectives’ which relate to this wider performance context.16 Such figures may be ‘fantastically, unpalatably unmotivated in naturalistic terms’ (2005, 51),17 but actors bold enough to attentively explore their ‘theatrical ­intentions’ can create compelling and unsettling effects. Escolme does not explicitly address Greek drama in her analysis, but her insights concerning characters’ ‘theatrical intentions’ within Shakespeare’s plays offer a valuable way of thinking about the kinds of theatrical storytelling invited by Athens’ ancient tragedies. Some contemporary theatre companies have successfully explored the theatrical potentials of direct address and audience interaction within tragedy. Kneehigh Theatre, whose version of The Bacchae (2004) was evoked at the beginning of this chapter, was founded by Mike Shepherd in the 1980s. The company made work for children and adults in a range of community settings before achieving national and international recognition for their adaptations of folktales and myths, including The Red Shoes (2001), Pandora’s Box (2002), The Wooden Frock (2004), and Tristan and Yseult (2005) (Radosavljević 2010, 89, 2013, 73). Emma Rice, Kneehigh’s artistic director from 2002 to 2015, has described the importance of notions of storytelling to developing these new versions of old tales with the company, starting with ‘“building the foundations of why”—finding out the actors’ first instincts about the story and what their reasons for telling the story would be’ (75). As Rice explains: I am not working with the script at all, so it would be a story. We will write down the themes. I will often say ‘what do you not like about it?’; and we will write down the problems—very quickly, no censorship at all. And I will say ‘what’s the colour’, ‘what’s the season’, ‘what are the key moments?’ and we are filling the room up with instinctive feelings about the story. That really forms the agenda. (Radosavljević 2010, 89) In this process, nobody has read a script and all I am saying is ‘what’s it about?’, ‘why are you doing it?’, ‘why would you tell the story?’. And the answer might be as simple as ‘because I had my heart broken once’ or ‘because I am afraid of the dark’ or it might be ‘because the world has to

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know that care is the only way through it’. It might be an epic reason, it might be tiny. It does not matter. But it means that everybody in the room has a connection to the story. (92)

In this way, the company’s multiple perspectives upon the story being re-shaped among them forms the basis upon which initial character improvisations, songs, and collaborative scene-building can begin to emerge (2013, 75). This collaborative process results in performers displaying a high degree of ownership over the adapted narratives they share with their audiences. Reflecting on her own experiences as an actor working in touring children’s theatre where ‘there was just you, the audience, and the story’, Rice remembers how: ‘I had to learn to talk with the children as they came in; to slide gently between ordinary speaking [and] performance’. She argues that this ‘hard-fought-for freedom’ gives the actor the presence and self-­ confidence to inhabit ‘the same space, the same world, the same temperature and situation as the audience do’, approaching them with confiding openness and ‘the generosity of a friend’ (2012), and transcending the self-protective ‘circles of attention’ advocated by Stanislavski’s Tortsov. In theoretical terms, such actors are capable of establishing presence through their ‘phenomenal bodies’ as well as the ‘semiotic bodies’ of the imaginary characters they play, their fluid movement between the two modes ‘running counter to the idea that the text has a fixed and immanent meaning’ (Fischer-Lichte, 35). The assured ease with which Kneehigh’s chorus of Bacchae accost their theatre audiences derives directly from the kinds of face-to-face communication demanded by school halls and community centres, but (as the opening of this chapter suggests) it also allows for creation of discomfiting, disturbing, and very grown-up moments where the story being performed suddenly ‘slides’ from a robustly comic register to a world of tragic violence, and consequence. Other contemporary storytelling practices can also provide creative crucial resources for the anxious actor, uneasy with the idea of risking direct engagement with their audience. The artform known in the UK as ‘performance storytelling’ (Crick Crack Club, 3) is a practice rooted in the unscripted, usually solo, re-performance of traditional stories (myths, legends, and sagas, folktales, and fairytales) for and with live audiences of all ages.18 The storyteller’s task is to engage their audience directly, finding new words and images through which to communicate old stories. The skilful performance storyteller is also capable of telling many different

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v­ ersions or variants of a single tale, choosing between these (and even creating new ones) in response to their changing performance contexts and environments. Performance storytellers are, of necessity, keenly attuned to the space and response of their co-present audiences, whose laughter, silence, indrawn breath, or shift of posture can all cue crucial modifications in the style and content of the story being shared. As Thomas Maguire observes in Performing Story on the Contemporary Stage (2015): For western acting after Stanislavski […] the principal circle of attention for the actor is confined within the dramatic frame and the events and circumstances of the fictional world. The storyteller, by contrast, always has a circle of attention that embraces directly the presence of the spectator […] the spectator in turn commits his or her attention directly back on the teller: they inhabit the same circle of attention. (167)

In this way, modern storytelling artists (often informed or inspired by older, traditional practices)19 habitually operate within a ‘circle of attention’ which significantly exceeds that of realist or naturalist theatre, but which shares some key characteristics with the shared light and narrative virtuosity of ancient Greek drama. Therefore, exploring some of storytelling’s foundational skills can be fruitful ground for the performer of tragedy’s extended narrative speeches. Engaging with contemporary storytelling practices can also help actors to develop a more assertive relationship with inherited narratives and texts. As Jack Zipes asserts in Michael Wilson’s Storytelling and Theatre, storytelling has traditionally had two possible functions: ‘to communicate the relevant values, norms, and customary practices of a group of people’, and to ‘question, change, and overthrow the dominant value system’ (xv). The storyteller’s understanding of their narrative repertoire as inherently flexible, and open to revision with each new context and re-performance, potentially makes the most venerable tale a site for radical creative interventions—in ways which challenge the reverence customarily accorded to the literal word of (translated, adapted) Greek plays. As Duška Radosavljević outlines, contemporary performers are increasingly ‘recognized as having the potential to act as authors in the medium of theatre’, within a wider context where the creation of performance-texts has been democratized, and where ‘the performance script is increasingly an unstable entity, a structure deliberately open to and contingent on the audience input,

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rather than serving as a set blueprint for performance’ (2015). Yet, tragedy’s actors are often hesitant to engage on these terms with the surviving texts of ancient plays. Here too, thinking more like a storyteller, understanding that an inherited narrative will mutate and evolve through a series of audience encounters, and that received interpretations may be subverted in the process, can help the contemporary actor to achieve a more spontaneously creative relationship with the ancient plays they explore and (perhaps) re-make.

5.7   Acting Myth: From the Studio The practical provocations and exercises which follow will proceed from the position that (while the realist approach endorsed by Goldhill and others always remains a practical option) tragedy’s extended narrative speeches also ‘engage the spectator in ways other than by revealing psychological motivation’ (Escolme, 51),20 and that a more informed understanding of Athenian tragedies’ mythic flexibility can help the present-day actor to identify and exploit moments of narrative virtuosity and playfulness within surviving texts. The following exercises also assume that this challenge demands that the performer of tragedy should engage (like contemporary storytelling practitioners) with a circle of attention which dramatically exceeds the safely limited portions of stage-space proposed by Stanislavski’s teachings—and that such encounters can radically re-shape inherited narratives, and their meanings. Certain exercises are additionally informed by the practices of contemporary performance storytellers, or the devising techniques through which Kneehigh Theatre’s actors create their own re-­ visions of extant narratives. 1. Widening the Circle This exercise is all about moving from an intimate ‘circle of attention’ to more inclusive awareness of the spaces you’re rehearsing or performing in, and of all the people sharing that environment. Three people is probably the minimum for the exercise to work effectively, though two people, moving in space, should be able to replicate most of the challenges explored here. Each participant should have learned by heart a single line from a tragic messenger speech. (It doesn’t matter which one. You can pick at random, or choose to focus on a play you’re working on.)

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• Make sure that you’re free of bodily tensions, and breathing easily, then spread out to fill the whole of your space. Working in silence at first, try to make eye contact with someone close to you. Hold the contact for a few seconds, then let it go. Smiling’s good, if it feels right, but try not to get embarrassed or giggle. Repeat the process with other people who are close by. • Repeat the process of making eye contact with someone close to you, but this time, once you’ve made contact, speak your chosen line to them, and listen to theirs in return, before you let the contact go. You should speak just loud enough for this one person to hear you; try to focus all your energy on communicating the meaning of your chosen line. • Next, repeat the process with someone further away in the space, drawing on a little more vocal and imaginative energy to make yourself noticed, heard, and understood. Then repeat the process with the person who’s furthest from you in the space. It may take longer to establish eye contact, and it will certainly take more energy to speak your line to them (especially in a noisy room), but persevere. Experiment with switching between long- and short-distance contacts. • If you’re working in a theatre, faced with the darkened rows of empty seats which spooked Stanislavski’s Kostya, you can additionally turn your attention to that space. Pick an individual seat close to you, and speak your line to that space. Don’t increase your volume, but instead focus all of your attention and energy on conveying the line’s meaning to that one (imaginary) listener. Then repeat the process for a seat further away. And then for one in the very back row. How much concentration and energy does it take for your message to travel across all that distance? 2. Performance Objectives This exercise draws on Escolme’s notion of the ‘performance objective’ (39), and explores a variation on the familiar acting exercise which allocates a transitive verb, sometimes also known as an ‘action’ verb (‘I impress you’, ‘I persuade you’, ‘I threaten you’, ‘I beguile you’), to each line of a character’s text.21 This is a good exercise to apply to any passage potentially inviting audience address, including prologues and

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messenger speeches. Aeschylus’ Persians or Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripides’ Andromache and Ion all contain great examples of the latter, but this example works with the god Dionysus’ prologue from the Bacchae. • Once you have read through and are familiar with your chosen speech, focus your attention on the effect you would wish each line of the text to have on your audience. As in the classic acting exercise, allocate a transitive verb phrase to each line of your speech (making a note of your choice in your script). However, in this instance, the target of your objectives, the ‘you’ of each transitive verb phrase, should be your audience. • So, for example, in the first few lines of Bacchae, in a speech where the god of wine, theatre, and ecstasy announces his return to his sceptical home city, you might choose: [I greet you] ‘Here am I, Dionysos’; [I impress you] ‘Son of Zeus and Kadmos’ daughter, Semele’; [I enlighten you] ‘I have returned to this land of Thebes’; [I awe you] ‘Where I was born from the lightning bolt’. (trans. Walton 2000, 109). • Now perform your text to as large an audience as your working group allows. Try to maintain the kind of ease and eye contact established in the previous exercise, and focus on shaping the imaginative and affective experience of your audience. • After your initial attempt, reflect on the effectiveness of your performance. Did your chosen verbs provide you with a coherent, varied, and engaging performance score? Did your audience respond more strongly to some choices than others? Give yourself time to revise your chosen verb phrases (perhaps in collaboration with your colleagues/audience) and repeat your speech with an updated set of ‘performance objectives’. • As you repeat the process, try to observe the kinds of information you’re getting back from your audience; posture, movement or stillness, coughing or yawning, even patterns of breathing can all give you vital information about their experience. Can you, like the ancient rhapsode Ion, judge how engaged your watchers are (moment to moment) with the imaginative landscape you’re evoking? Can you make changes to your planned performance as you go along, to respond to unexpected reactions?

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This exercise challenges the actor to behave in ways more usually associated with the ancient performers of epic, or the professional storyteller today (Wilson, 45–6), for whom an attentive monitoring of each performance’s progress plays a vital role in creative decision making.22 It also challenges theatre-makers to place their acting objectives, and their focus, in a circle of attention which explicitly includes audience members, and where an unfolding spoken narrative provides the basis for a collaborative act of shared imagining. 3. Story, Not Text This exercise draws inspiration from the work of Emma Rice and Kneehigh Theatre, as well as from performance storytelling practices. It aims to support actors in identifying and articulating their own perspectives upon an ancient, mythic narrative, becoming active contemporary interpreters of an inherited story. As Rice (2012) explains: ‘By always treating the text as a story not as a text, the landscape of choices gently alter’. • Gather together as a relaxed group. A circle on the floor is perfect; you might even want to introduce some mats or cushions to make sure everyone’s sitting comfortably. • Working around the circle, each participant takes it in turn to tell the story of the play you’ve chosen to work on. It’s important that everyone offers a story and not a plot; actors often need to resist the urge to say things like ‘then the herald comes on stage’, which belong to the dramaturgy of a given play, and not to the mythic tale it’s based on. • Each participant should also feel free to move through the events and incidents of your chosen story in their own way. Some will linger over domestic scenes; others will revel in the high drama of epic battle. It’s likely that some participants will find themselves describing scenes which aren’t directly depicted in your chosen play. Some will speak at length, others will pare their story down to a few sentences, or a handful of resonant images. All these things are fine. The aim of this exercise is not to establish unanimity, but to explore the range of perspectives and interpretations present in the studio or rehearsal room.

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• Each speaker should tell their tale uninterrupted, with discussion saved for the end of the exercise, but listeners should be alert to the ‘landscape of choices’ emerging from the multiple stories being told. Once everyone has spoken, it’s good to spend some time reflecting on the range of stories presented, and the ways in which different people’s imaginings of an inherited narrative potentially complement, challenge, or co-exist with one another. This is also a good way to identify a group’s instinctive responses to a tragic play. Are there characters or incidents that everyone loves? Are there particular moments which repeatedly create a feeling of unease or unhappiness? Are there acts or arguments articulated within the ancient story which members of the group feel compelled to contest? Finding out how each member of the group would choose to tell the play’s story can offer valuable insights into the challenges, and the potentials, or re-staging ancient drama with a particular community of contemporary artists, in specific social and cultural contexts. • As your project  or study develops, you may wish to return to this exercise, acknowledging that different participants’ imaginative and emotional engagement with a given narrative will mature and change over time. • Re-visiting the process, it can also be valuable for storytellers to take ownership of their creative instincts and choices, in relation to the rest of the group, and (if appropriate) your intended audience. Encourage each participant, at the end of their story, to articulate a personal answer to Emma Rice’s (2012) question: ‘Why do I need to tell this story to these people?’ 4. Creating Counter-Narratives This exercise is adapted from one taught by performance storyteller Vayu Naidu. The present version is all about developing the sense that a mythic narrative re-presented within tragedy may, at any moment, veer off in unexpected directions. It aims to counteract the common misconception that everything which happens in a tragedy is ‘inevitable’. This exercise is based on a pair of performers, A and B, working together using a messenger speech both are familiar with.

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• Performer A reads the text of a messenger speech, pausing very slightly at the end of each line, phrase, or image. Performer B’s task is to interrupt as often as they can, contradicting what’s just been said, and improvising a series of counter-narratives which subvert or offer alternatives to the ‘official’ version. The aim isn’t for B to create a polished, credible, or even coherent story, but to highlight all of the moments at which things might potentially go otherwise. • You can do this work with any messenger speech, but here’s an example using an extract from Euripides’ Alcestis  (438 BCE), in which a queen who has volunteered to die to save her husband’s life prepares for her final moments: A: When she realised the fatal day was here/She bathed her pallid skin in water from the stream …. B: No, she looked into the river, saw her face, and remembered she was still young. She threw herself into the water and swam away … A: Then, after bathing, took a dress and ornaments/From her cedarwood chest and put them on … B: No, she screamed and she fought. She tore off her jewellery. She started to pack a suitcase. She bought a plane ticket to Las Vegas … A: Standing before the altar at the hearth/She prayed to Hestia, patron of the home: /‘Mistress this is the last time I shall pray to you. /I am leaving now to go beneath the earth …’ B: She cried out to all the gods to save her. And her prayer was heard. Hestia set a circle of fire around the queen, so Death couldn’t come close …. (quoted text trans. Walton in Walton & McLeish 1997a, 9)

Once you’ve reached the end of the speech, reflect with your partner on how the presence of a dissenting voice affects your attitude towards the ‘official’ text being narrated. 5. Tragic Text as Counter-Narrative This extends the previous exercise, strengthening the actor’s awareness that a given tragedy’s narratives exist within a nexus of diverse, sometimes competing, mythic variants,23 and helping to re-invest tragedy’s reported narratives with tension and suspense.

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• Once you’ve worked through the whole speech, coming up with many alternatives, decide upon your favourite counter-narrative elements, and combine them (roughly) into a single narrative sequence. Take a moment for B to note down the main points of this new version of the story (though it doesn’t matter if you can’t remember everything exactly). • Go back to the beginning of the speech. This time, B will be the first to speak, presenting their alternative storyline as if they were the messenger’s official account. A’s task is to interrupt wherever possible, using the tragedy’s extant text to challenge and contest B’s narrative. (You may need to add or alter a few words to respond effectively to what’s being said. That’s fine.) B: The queen woke up, and realised what day it was. She knew she’d made a horrible mistake. She needed a new plan … A: When she realised the fatal day was here/She bathed her pallid skin in water from the stream …. B: She went to the river, stared at her reflection, and remembered she was still young. She threw herself into the water and tried to swim away… A: After bathing, [she] took a dress and ornaments/From her cedarwood chest and put them on … B: Forced back to the palace, she screamed and she fought. She tore off her jewellery. She dragged a suitcase out of the attic … A: Standing before the altar at the hearth/She prayed to Hestia, patron of the home: /‘Mistress this is the last time I shall pray to you. /I am leaving now to go beneath the earth. /Look after my children …’ B: She cried out to all the gods to save her. She forgot about her kids, and … A: ‘For my son/Find a loving wife; for my daughter a decent husband. / And let them not die like their mother …’ (quoted lines from Alcestis trans. J. Michael Walton 1997a, 9)

Once you’ve completed the exercise, compare your experiences. What’s the difference between being the official (first) narrator and the second (revisionary or subversive) speaker? When you spoke first, what differences did you notice in your commitment, energy, and intentions as you were interrupted, and challenged? When you spoke second, how did the need to contest your partner’s statements impact upon your pace, vocal delivery, and physical presence?

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6. Why Don’t You Let Yourself Go? The title of this exercise borrows from Kneehigh’s version of The Bacchae (2004) where (as discussed at the beginning of this chapter) the chorus of maenads—a troop of bald-headed blokes in ballet dresses— invited their audience to imaginatively collude in what (at first) seemed like a jolly, slightly daft, bit of fooling. ‘Why does it matter?/Why don’t you let yourself go?’ the chorus sang (Grose, Murphy & Rice, 85). This exercise comparably seeks to develop the skills of imaginative misdirection in the rehearsal room, with the aim of restoring suspense and surprise to ancient tragedy’s virtuosic narrative speeches. • Take it in turns to perform a version of a messenger speech from tragedy to the rest of your group. You can choose any tragic messenger speech to work with, but you should know at least some of the speech’s key lines by heart before you begin. • The first part of your speech should be improvised and playful, highly responsive to your listeners, and their expectations. Your challenge is to subvert their imaginative expectations by focusing attention on unexpected or incongruous aspects of the situation you describe. • You might find yourself developing an extended comic riff on the challenges of digging a grave in a sandstorm (Antigone), or pondering the possibility of Death getting lost in a big palace, and dragging his great sword round and round in exasperated circles (Alcestis)— try to be open to whatever incongruous ideas pop into your head on the spur of the moment. You are absolutely free to use all the imaginative resources at your disposal, including vivid storytelling language, laughter, personal guarantees of good faith, or outright lies. Your aim is to persuade your listeners to ‘let themselves go’, willingly abandoning the contours of a known tragic plot for the imaginative, subversive pleasures of live storytelling. • Only when you have thoroughly misdirected your listeners, using your own imaginative quickness and eloquent improvised speech, are you permitted to revert to the text of your chosen play, and to the conclusion of the speech as written. Once everyone in the group has had a chance to try this out, tale some time to share your experiences, and reflect on the challenges and potentials of such narrative misdirection. How does it feel, after creating and

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performing subversive alternatives, to return to the established story, and received text, of a play? How can the creative interplay of free and fixed elements potentially re-invigorate the contemporary actor’s engagement with ancient narratives?24 7. The ‘Swerve’ This exercise returns the actor to performing the messenger speech as written, paying particular attention to the way in which tragedy’s messengers are required to move fluently between engaging with other (onstage) characters, and evoking offstage acts and events which create vivid images in the (real-world) audience’s imaginations. The watchman in Sophocles’ Antigone, who catches the play’s eponymous protagonist in the forbidden act of burying her brother, offers a good example: It was like this. We went back to the body After all your terrible threats, And we brushed off the dust that covered it, So as to make the rotting corpse properly naked. Then we settled down on the hill, Upwind, so the stink wouldn’t hit us. We kept awake by yelling insults At each other when a slacker nodded off. That went on for a long time, till the sun Stood bright in the center of the sky. And we were getting really cooked. Then, Suddenly, a tornado struck. It raised dust All over the plain, grief to high heaven. It thrashed the low-lying woods with terror And filled the whole wide sky. We shut our eyes And held out against this plague from the gods. After a long while it lifted, and then we saw the girl. She gave a shrill cry like a bird when she sees her nest Empty, and the bed deserted where her nestlings had lain. That was how she was when she saw the corpse uncovered. She cried out in mourning, and she called down Curses on whoever had done this thing. Right away she spread thirsty dust with her hands, Then poured the three libations from a vessel of fine bronze. And so she crowned the corpse with honor.

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As soon as we spotted her, we started to run. She showed no fear; it was easy to catch her. Then we questioned her about her past and present actions. She did not deny a single thing. For me, that was sweet, and agonizing, too. It’s a great joy to be out of trouble, But bringing trouble on your friends is agony. Still, I don’t mind that so much. It’s nature’s way For me to put my own survival first. (trans. Woodruff in Meineck & Woodruff 2003, 19–20)

In this speech, Sophocles’ watchman begins by remembering the king’s former threats, before moving into an evocative central passage describing Antigone’s discovery that her brother’s body has been uncovered, and then returning to more immediate personal concerns, including the happy reflection that Antigone’s capture means that he’s out of trouble. The watchman ‘swerves’ from being a disgruntled, anxious servant, to a poetically gifted theatrical storyteller, and then back again—all in the course of a single speech.25 • Working with this speech, or with any other messenger speech from tragedy, try to distinguish between moments when the messenger is primarily ‘in character’ (dealing with other onstage characters in ways suitable for a slave, soldier, herald, etc.) and when they ‘swerve’ away from their fictional circumstances to pursue ‘performance objectives’ (planting vivid images in the audience’s minds, or engaging listeners with the twists and turns of a dramatic story). • You can mark these moments using different colours, or by highlighting the moment(s) when each ‘swerve’ takes place. (For example, with the speech quoted above, you might choose ‘then we saw the girl’ as a key moment of transition, cuing the performer to guide the audience’s towards a personal visualization of Antigone’s actions.) • You can also map these transitions using a pencil line running alongside the speech’s text. When the messenger is primarily interacting, in character, with other people onstage, the line should run close to the edge of the printed text. When they ‘swerve’ towards being a tragic storyteller with performance objectives to achieve, the line should move further into the margin, leaving you with a set of curves or zig-zags (depending on the number and pace of transitions you’ve

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identified). The resulting diagram can serve as a simple, visual guide to the different levels of characterization, the particular performance objectives, and the varying circles of attention, which are potentially called for at different moments of your speech. This exercise operates on the basis that the skill sets of the actor and the contemporary storyteller are not absolutely separate (Walton, 45–6), and that the actor of tragedy needs to be able to move fluently between the two, performing convincingly in-role, while also being capable of talking to, and imaginatively engaging, a co-present, co-creating audience.

5.8   Acting Myth: Epilogue This chapter has contended that the primary ‘performance objective’ of an actor in ancient tragedy is to ‘to engage the audience with his or her story’ (Escolme, 45). This task requires an understanding of tragedy’s multiple narratives, and a personal engagement with a co-present audience, which disturb both conventional Aristotelian criticism and many versions of Stanislavski-inspired acting practice, particularly those which assume the presence of a theatrical fourth wall. The former, based on a proto-scientific desire to locate the most characteristic examples of a given poetic genre, has over many centuries ossified into a narrow canon of plays conventionally labelled the ‘best’ tragedies, all popularly assumed to follow near-­ identical narrative trajectories. Meanwhile, the latter, focusing the actor’s attention on localized ‘circles of attention’ (Benedetti 2008, 90–106), and demanding that all the character’s imagined objectives must lie on ‘our side of the footlights’ (Benedetti 2010, 145), makes the idea of talking directly to an audience deeply unsettling for many modern performers. However, theatrical storytelling was a key component of ancient tragic dramaturgy, with fifth-century playwrights appropriating and adapting the bravura narrative set pieces of epic to extend their plays’ imaginative scope far beyond the mimetic here-and-now of a given drama. Emerging out of a story culture underpinned by an endlessly malleable corpus of archaic myths, and by the face-to-face virtuosity of epic performance (including the kinds of infectious imagining evoked by Plato’s Ion), tragedy negotiated its own (sometimes radical) re-makings of extant narratives in the shared daylight of the open-air theatre-space, in creative collaboration with its mythically literate audiences. To insist that tragedy’s storytelling

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should conform to the principles and practices of realist theatre is, therefore, to limit the potential affective power, and narrative playfulness, of surviving Greek plays in contemporary re-performance. The example of Kneehigh’s The Bacchae, modulating from chatty, comedic banter to startling physical intensity, here exemplifies the potential value of imaginative complicity in the re-performance of tragedy on contemporary stages. As Govan, Nicholson, and Normington assert, the decision ‘to place narrative on stage’ can create a pleasurable sense of creative dialogue, and togetherness, between stage and auditorium (100–1). In a context where the old-fashioned fourth wall is no longer a given, a theatrical aesthetic which charms or coaxes spectators into becoming imaginative co-creators can speak to a widespread desire to establish a beneficial sense of community through live performance (Freshwater 2009, 55–61).26 But direct address and theatrical storytelling (of the kind cultivated by Kneehigh) are also capable of achieving dissonant moments of suspense, shock, or surprise. Apparently friendly and confiding direct address can beguile, mislead, or misdirect. Those unpredictably ancient/ modern figures who speak directly to their audience, sparking imagination and creative complicity, may ultimately subvert narrative expectations, sowing anxiety instead of reassurance, and disrupting comfortable assumptions about theatre patrons’ relationship with the archetypes—and the atrocities—evoked in Athenian tragedy. In addition,  re-discovering the instability and flexibility of tragedy’s mythic narratives can license the creation of multiple, potentially subversive readings of theatre texts often assumed (particularly by Aristotelian scholarship) to be singular, quasi-sacred, and inviolable. As Emma Rice observes, ‘treating the text as a story’ means that the ‘landscape of choices’ available to today’s creative artists is altered (2012). The devising practices of Kneehigh, focusing on company members’ personal responses to a mythic story—and the many different perspectives and interpretations which can arise from these—potentially point the way to an engagement with ancient tragedy which foregrounds the provisionality of inherited texts, and the possibility of modern theatre-makers and ensembles assuming the ‘authorship’ (Radosavljević 2015) of their own versions of ancient plays, re-activating and (perhaps infinitely) extending the multiple narratives of the ancient tragic canon, in relation to an infinite number of audiences and settings.

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Notes 1. Though pantomime and tragedy have repeatedly been linked by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison (2002, 5, 2004, 45, 109–10). 2. Listed here in the probable order of their first performance. The three dramas were never intended as a single, coherent ‘trilogy’, though they are often presented that way today. 3. Goldhill argues that ‘the institution of tragedy seems to flourish precisely over the period in which the democratic city comes into being’, and that during the fifth century BCE, ‘a whole series of notions which are important to the city and the development of civic ideology are put through a profound questioning in its dramatic texts’ (1986, 77). For an important critique of the ‘myth of simultaneous origin’ (Ridout, 13), see Laera (210–15). 4. The classic account of the epic-singer as oral artist was developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the early twentieth century (Lord, 150– 6). On the impact of this work on contemporary creative artists, see Harrop (2018). For the defining features of oral poetry, see Foley (2002). 5. Foley (1990, 21–30); Nagy (1996a, 65–112, b, 109–12); Scodel (2002, 43–55). 6. All quotations from Murray & Dorsch (2000). 7. On interactions between rhapsodes and actors in Athens see Gonzáles (Chaps. 9 and 11). 8. It’s unclear how the wearing of masks in tragic performance may have affected this inter-reactivity; perhaps tragedy’s actors relied on sound as much as vision to measure audience responses to an unfolding narrative. Archaic epic-singers and later rhapsodes performed without masks. 9. The introduction to The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus contains a hymn to the value (and values) of shared theatrical light. Harrison (2004, 3–11). 10. Compare Wiles (1997, 115). 11. On the rise of realism, see Zarrilli et al. (287–92; 322–3). 12. A few symbolic props, heavily imbued with narrative significance, do play a vital role in several tragedies, as explored in detail by Taplin (77–100), Goldhill (2007, 86–93), and Ley (165–220). 13. The desire to disavow audience address is a common reflex among classicist scholars of tragedy. In Greek Tragedy in Action, Taplin asserts: ‘There is, in fact, in my view, not one single place in the whole of surviving Greek tragedy where there is direct audience address’ (187). It is unclear where this view leaves (for example) Euripidean prologues, like those which begin Andromache and Helen, Bacchae, or Ion. 14. Goldhill’s arguments are informed by the familiar judgement that tragedy became more engaged with representing a realistically detailed account of human experience over the course of the fifth century BCE, with Aeschylus’

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Oresteia trilogy focusing on ‘external’ motivation and authority (2007, 112) while Euripides’ Orestes displays ‘a full range of internal motivations’ (2007, 115). He notes ‘a general development of interest in psychology’ across the century (2007, 115). 15. Earlier translations of Stanislavski referred to these as ‘Objectives’ (Benedetti 2010, 82). In An Actor’s Work, Tortsov makes it clear that such ‘Tasks’ must ‘exist on our side of the footlights and not on the other […] directed towards the other actors, and not to the audience in the front rows’ (145). 16. These figures operate in what States describes as ‘The Collaborative Mode’, inhabiting a fictive world ‘which includes the audience’ (29). States observes that ‘tragedy is a non-collaborative form, as usually performed, characterized by a spectator’s ‘magnificent loneliness’ (30). However, he also acknowledges that this this reading of tragic theatregoing ‘is substantially a product of indoor “evening” theatre’, rather than the kinds of stage familiar the Greek tragedians, in which a play’s audience ‘was very visible’ (36). 17. Escolme’s model self-consciously runs counter to ‘the Stanislavskian conceit of organic character development, whereby every line and action […] must hold to a psychological logic contained within the play’s fiction’ (66). 18. Wilson notes that comparable practices in the USA tend to be labelled ‘platform storytelling’ (2006, Chap. 3). 19. In the UK, debate continues as to whether such practices should be thought of as a ‘revival’ of authentic oral traditions, or as a new variety of creative practices drawing inspiration from pre-industrial approaches to sharing stories. Wilson (11–17; 21–30). 20. For practical explorations with students (based on the Shakespearean role of Cressida), see Escolme (44–6). 21. An exercise which can be traced back to Stanislavski’s approaches. See Benedetti (2008, 144; 148). In the UK, the classic version of ‘actioning’ is associated with theatre company Out of Joint (formerly Joint Stock). 22. On the co-creation of tragedy in the modern performance event, see Fischer-Lichte (29–31). 23. In Brechtian terms, what’s being sought in this exercise is a version of ‘Not—But’ (Willett, 137; 197); a critical awareness of possible alternatives, and of the effect of human choices upon dramatic outcomes. 24. On comparable interactions in the contemporary re-performance of epic, see Harrop (2013a, 83–6, b, 2018). 25. This ‘swerve’ closely echoes Rice’s (2012) description of how, as a young actress, she learned to ‘slide’ between self and character in performance. 26. For an important critique such aspirations in relation to Greek tragedy, see Laera (229–33) and Ridout (15; 19–25).

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References Benedetti, J.  2008, Konstantin Stanislavski: An Actor’s Work, Routledge, Abingdon. Benedetti, J. 2010, Konstantin Stanislavski: An Actor’s Work on a Role, Routledge, Abingdon. Cartledge, P. 1997, ‘“Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life’, in P.E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3–35. Clark, M. 2012, Exploring Greek Myth, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. Crick Crack Club. n.d., Frequently (& Not So Frequently) Asked Questions, viewed 8 January 2018, http://www.crickcrackclub.com/MAIN/FAQ.PDF. Escolme, B. 2005, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self, Routledge, Abingdon. Fischer-Lichte, E. 2010, ‘Performance as Event—Reception as Transformation’, in E. Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 29–42. Foley, J.M. 1990, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-­ Croatian Return Song, University of California Press, Berkeley. Foley, J.M. 1999, Homer’s Traditional Art, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA. Foley, J.M. 2002, How to Read an Oral Poem, University of Illinois Press, Chicago. Foley, J.M. 2005, ‘Analogues: Modern Oral Epics’, in J.M.  Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic, Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 196–212. Freshwater, H. 2009, Theatre & Audience, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Goldhill, S. 1986, Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gonzáles, J.M. 2015, The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective, Harvard University Press, Harvard. Govan, E., Nicholson, H. & Normington, K. 2007, Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Routledge, Abingdon. Grose, C., Murphy, A.M. & Rice, E. 2005, The Bacchae: A Tragedy in One Act, in Kneehigh Anthology Volume 1: Tristan and Yseult, Red Shoes, The Wooden Frock, The Bacchae, Oberon, London, pp. 63– 120. Harrison, T. 2002, Plays 4: The Oresteia; The Common Chorus, Faber and Faber, London. Harrison, T. 2004, Plays 5: The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus; Square Rounds, Faber and Faber, London. Harrop, S. 2013a, ‘Speech, Silence and Epic Performance: Alice Oswald’s Memorial’, New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, vol. 8, pp. 79–91.

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Harrop, S. 2013b, ‘The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey and The Factory, The Odyssey’, Didaskalia, vol. 10, no. 11, pp. 55–61. Harrop, S. 2018, ‘Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance’, in F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison & C. Kenward (eds), Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 262–74. Jensen, M.S. 2005, ‘Performance’, in J.M. Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic, Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 45–54. Johnston, S.I. 2015, ‘The Greek Mythic Storyworld’, Arethusa, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 283–311. Laera, M. 2013, Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Peter Lang, Bern. Lord, A.B. 2003 [1960], The Singer of Tales, 2nd Edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Maguire, T. 2015, Performing Story on the Contemporary Stage, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Martin, R.P. 2005, ‘Epic as Genre’, in J.M. Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic, Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 9–19. Meineck, P. & Woodruff, P. (trans.). 2003, Sophocles: Theban Plays, Hackett, Indianapolis. Meineck, P. & Woodruff, P. (trans.). 2007, Sophocles: Four Tragedies, Hackett, Indianapolis. Murray, P. & Dorsch, T.S. (trans.). 2000, Classical Literary Criticism, Penguin, London. Nagy, G. 1996a, Homeric Questions, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Nagy, G. 1996b, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Radosavljević, D. 2010, ‘Emma Rice in Interview with Duŝka Radosavljevic’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 89–98. Radosavljević, D. 2013, Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Radosavljević, D. 2015, ‘10 Traits of Theatre-Making in the 21st Century’, Exeunt Magazine, viewed 8 January 2018, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/ ten-traits-of-theatre-making-in-the-21st-century/. Rice, E. 2012, ‘The Essay: On Directing’, BBC Radio 3, viewed 8 January 2018, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bw8hv. Ridout, N. 2013, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Scodel, R. 2002, Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative and Audience, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Scodel, R. 2004, ‘The Story-Teller and His Audience’, in R.  Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 45–55.

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States, B.O. 2002, ‘The Actor’s Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’, in P.B. Zarrilli (ed.), Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, Routledge, London, pp. 23–39. Taplin, O. 1985 [1978], Greek Tragedy in Action, Methuen, London. Walton, J.M. (ed.). 2000, Euripides: Plays I, Methuen, London. Walton, J.M. & McLeish, K. (trans.). 1997a, Euripides: Plays III, Methuen, London. Walton, J.M. & McLeish, K. (eds). 1997b, Euripides: Plays V, Methuen, London. Wiles, D. 1997, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Willett, J.  1964, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, Methuen, London. Wilson, M. 2006, Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and their Art, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Wright, M. 2016, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy 1: Neglected Authors, Bloomsbury, London. Zarrilli, P.P., McConachie, B., Williams, G.J. & Sorgenfrei, S.F. 2010, Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, Routledge, Abingdon.

CHAPTER 6

Acting Space

6.1   From the Auditorium: Young Girls, Thundering To sit in the stalls of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh is to be bathed in blue and gilt opulence. The Victorian auditorium is all red plush and duck-egg-blue paint, its gold fretwork burnished to a gentle glow by chandelier and lamp light. The stage-space in front of me strikes a discordant note, though; a large, rectangular precinct of concrete slabs projects out beyond the proscenium arch in a calculatedly brutalist thrust. Then there’s movement, and sound, caught out of the corner of my eye. Through a door, I see arms and legs, flashes of long hair; I hear thumps as trainer-­ wearing feet pound up unseen stairs. The whispered conversation of two older ladies behind me registers fascinated horror at the sight and sound of these ‘young girls … thundering’. These are not the kind of people who have the right to traverse theatre space at will. This is not the way they should move through the gilded splendours of an old, beloved theatre. I’ve come to Edinburgh to see a new production of The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus (produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Actors Touring Company, first staged in autumn 2016). This is an ancient drama profoundly concerned with the occupation and contestation of space. In the play, fifty Egyptian virgins seek sanctuary from forced marriages in the Greek city of Argos, causing consternation among a local populace who fear—it turns out, rightly—that granting these women asylum may lead to a foreign dispute erupting on their own territory. But the production is equally

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c­ oncerned with the signification and ownership of theatrical space. The performance begins unconventionally, with a non-theatrical guest (today it’s a local councillor) invited onstage to read a breakdown of the play’s budget, outlining the percentage of the production’s running costs contributed by different groups. He names the proportion of the cost borne by local tax-­ payers, and by those who have bought tickets to see the play. He invites spectators to make up a small shortfall by spending money freely at the theatre bar. This latter proposal is greeted with mirth, the audience’s laughter and comments setting up a genial hum throughout the still-lit auditorium. I’m suddenly, unusually, aware of myself as part of a temporary community with shared pleasures, common vices, and a collective responsibility for funding the artistic events we attend. In a gesture that recalls the festival contexts of Athenian tragedy, the politician is also required to pour a libation, an offering to Dionysus. A little embarrassed, unsure of how to manage mic and script as well as the bottle of red wine he’s now handed, the local worthy complies. He splashes the wine along the front edge of the thrust stage, mimicking ancient sacrificial ritual, while the chorus yell praises to Dionysus. The raw-edged smell of the drink drifts through the stalls. Watchers are visibly torn between amusement, exhilaration, and anxiety. Is this going to be allowed? Will the theatre’s furnishings (or the well-heeled front row) get splashed? The Victorian decorums and social stratifications maintained by the Lyceum’s red plush and a gilded, picture-frame stage are in collision with a different set of conventions. The local politico’s speech also highlights The Suppliant Women’s reliance upon the time and energy of the volunteer actors who make up the play’s protagonist-chorus. The thirty-odd young women who play the daughters of Danaus are those same figures I briefly sighted thundering up the stairs in trainers and gym-kit or street-clothes. Now they take their places onstage, their labour is acknowledged, and applauded, in a moment which affirms that a miscellaneous gang of young women, without professional training or theatrical polish, may validly assume the spatial self-assertion of the Aeshylean chorus. And this chorus (led by a single professional actress, Gemma May Rees, and choreographed by Sasha Milavic Davies) is definitely assertive. They are individually distinctive, displaying different levels of energy and physical skill. They lack the disciplined, drilled uniformity often associated with idealizing visions of the tragic chorus. But, at the show’s best moments, this doesn’t matter at all. Confronting the singular figure of the

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Argive king (Oscar Batterham), these massed suppliants, their wool-strung olive boughs held, horizontally, as a weapon might be hefted, could easily be the Amazons he initially conjectures them to be. Moving and responding en masse, even their appeal for sanctuary becomes a vigorous physical action, leaving the king hemmed in on every side, unable (even as he demands time/space for thought and counsel) to escape the encircling presence of these foreign women who have reversed the expected powerrelations of Argive territory. Pleading, insisting, they drive him downstage until he is pressed back against the extreme edge of the stage, perilously poised between the fictive space appropriated by the play’s chorus, and the present-day theatre space of the auditorium. Anxiously glancing back over his shoulder, he registers the massed citizens of ‘our’ city (unusually aware of ourselves as such, after the prologue). In this moment, Edinburgh finds itself standing in the unseen Argos, figured as an adversarial body of citizens, breathing down the beleaguered king’s neck. Our space, as well as the production’s stage-space, has been politicized. What would each of us, in the Argives’ place, demand of a political leader? What choices have we already made in our own real lives? This drama, like many of the plays surviving from the fifth century BCE, relies upon the ability of its choruses to transform the spaces they occupy and struggle over. Resting, after their argumentative triumph (possession of sacred space providing the women with their ultimate bargaining chip), the chorus make their own libations, tipping buckets of milk across the stage, stomping and splashing through the resulting spill. As they sing in memory of their ancestress, Io, and her calf-child Epaphus (begotten by Zeus while its mother was cursed to wear the shape of a cow) they dance, run, and (yes) thunder, incorporating the mythic calf’s happy, messy, splashy, riverside play into the motion of their own bodies. As they move differently through stage-space, Edinburgh becomes Argos becomes Egypt. Later still, as the stage is darkened and the chorus pass around jam-jar lanterns, the women’s movements through space are picked out in candle-­ light. Then other flames appear, the torches borne by violent emissaries of their would-be husbands, determined to drag the women away from Argive sanctuary. Suddenly, the production’s visual score is simplified into an interplay of torches and candles, patterns of lights advancing and retreating, aggressively occupying stage-space or clinging together for security. The women’s vocal text, chanted and sung to the accompaniment of percussion and aulos, is sometimes audible and sometimes not, getting lost in the rush of bodies, and the heavy scuffle of feet. It doesn’t really matter. The heart of the tragedy, today, lies in the spectacle of a group of young women, each

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individually distinct and distinctly of her own contemporary city, taking a stand on the tragic stage. Together, they assert their collective, impassioned, and embodied concern for an ancient (and  yet permanently unresolved)1 narrative of displacement and asylum-seeking. Together, they activate a series of spatial transformations. And I’m forcefully reminded that tragedy’s spaces are anything but static, safe, and stable.

6.2   Acting Space: An Introduction As a modern actor reading ancient plays, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of space, and physical interactions within space, to tragic dramaturgy. The reading eye scans over pages (and pages …) of choral ode, without any prompt to consider what’s going on physically during these extended, poetic passages. One of the biggest problems is that the surviving texts of tragedy contain absolutely nothing that a modern actor would recognize as stage directions. This might be taken as suggesting that the movements and interactions of bodies in space were of no interest to ancient tragedians. But as this chapter will show, such a conclusion would be dead wrong. Aristotelian scholarly traditions are part of the problem. In the Poetics, the ancient philosopher does list opsis as one of six key components of tragedy (1450a).2 However, this term (the Greek word means ‘sight’, ‘appearance’ or ‘view’, but is regularly translated as ‘spectacle’) comes at the very end of a list presented in descending order of importance. And shortly after, Aristotle comments that: ‘Staging can be emotionally attractive, but is not a matter of art and is not integral to poetry’. He adds: ‘Staging belongs more to the scene-painter’s art than to that of the poet’s’ (1450b). For Aristotle, the literary mechanics of plot and poetry were the core of tragic endeavour. The business of making a performance space look attractive or appropriate is dismissed as belonging to a different type of craftsman. And the question of how a drama’s interactions might be realized within the physical space of a theatre, how actors’ bodies moving in relation to one another, and to a given space, create theatrical meaning? Well, that’s not considered at all.3 It’s somewhat ironic, then, that this passage of Aristotle is the source of a term which has become profoundly important in contemporary theatre-­ making. As Scott Palmer explains, the Greek word skenographia (scene-­ painting) has become, in current usage, ‘scenography’. He continues:

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The compound term derives from ‘skene’ (stage building) and the verb ‘grapho’ (which means ‘to make line drawings’ or ‘write’) […] In contemporary performance practice, the term is replacing that of ‘theatre design’ and has come to represent the complex interrelationships between space, object, material, light and sound that define the space and place of performance. (Pitches & Popat, 52)

Scenographers, operating in a field of creativity which exceeds that of the traditional theatre designer, generate environments which give spatial expression to a performance’s themes, preoccupations, moods, or metaphors, providing landscapes for performers to travel through and interact with (rather than flat, pictorial settings to act in front of). Scenographers are also concerned with conceptualizing the range of ways in which spectators, performers, and space may be orchestrated throughout the duration of a performance. As explained by Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth, scenography is a multi-modal discipline, which deploys physical structures, light, images, sounds, costume, and objects in relation to ‘the performing bodies, the text, the space in which the performance takes place and the placement of the audience’ (4). As this definition suggests, the technical resources of the present-day scenographer are significantly more varied than those available to the ancient playwright. And while the contemporary scenographer has the freedom to fabricate an endless variety of performance environments, a single, fixed architectural space was almost always a given in ancient tragic performance. Yet, the role of the contemporary scenographer can help to shed light on the ­variety of creative responsibilities undertaken by the ancient playwright. Like the present-day scenographer, ancient playwrights needed to be skilled manipulators of ‘the scenic environment, objects, costumes, light and sound’, as well as the ways in which performance unfolds through ‘space and time’ (6), and through the costumed,4 moving bodies of its performers. If, as Paul Monaghan puts it, scenography is ‘spatial poetry’ exerting an ‘active presence’ upon an unfolding performance (2010, 243), then ancient playwrights were spatial poets. Ancient tragedy has no written stage directions because it needed none. Athens’ poet-playwrights were not only literary artists. They were multi-­ skilled theatre-makers, usually expected to act as the directors (the word used was didaskalos, or ‘teacher’) of their own choruses, and sometimes accomplished performers themselves. It is probable that they were on hand (perhaps more aptly, on their feet) during tragedy’s long rehearsal

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period, able to physically demonstrate to their actors how an episode or chorus might be enhanced by appropriate spatial arrangements. They were intimately, practically familiar with the multi-layered resonances of the space known as a theatron (a ‘seeing-place’). For ancient Athens’ tragedians, the resources of their most important theatron (the Theatre of Dionysus) included a rounded dancing space (known as the orchestra),5 which was primarily associated with the presence of the tragic chorus, and was accessed via two exposed pathways called eisodoi; plus a wooden building or façade (the skene), which marked the upstage limit of the playing area, was probably fronted by a low stage, and could be reached by steps leading up from the orchestra. The skene had a practical door, and often represented the threshold of a palace or other dwelling, though it could also stand in for the entrance to a temple (in Euripides’ Ion), a tent (Sophocles Ajax or Euripides’ Hecuba), or a cave (Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Euripides’ satyr-play Cyclops). Through this opening, too, tableaux (often gory) could be revealed to the watching audience through the use of a device called the ekkyklema (a low, mobile platform which could be rolled out to display previously arranged objects— often the bodies of characters who have died offstage). Some scholars have speculated that a low stone marker in the centre of the orchestra identified the place where an archaic altar had once stood, giving a dramatic focus to tragic stories where exiles, refugees, or captives claim sanctuary at religious sites (Wiles 1997, 71–3, 78). The power of the Olympian gods could also be manifested through their appearance on the skene roof, to or from which actors playing gods or heroes would sometimes ‘fly’ in a mechane (wooden crane).6 Through their expert manipulation of these resources, the creators of ancient tragedy were able to generate rich and complex interplays of text, story, sound, space, and bodies in motion. Ancient tragedy’s playwrights were deeply alert to the resonances of space, and to the ways in which visual images and spatial relationships create dramatic interest within a given location. Many of the period’s surviving plays assume a company of actors skilled in mapping tragedy’s fraught inter-personal and political relationships into spatial terms, with a highly developed ability to evoke and negotiate multiple real and imaginary locales. The survey which follows introduces some of the different kinds of space which could be explored and exploited in ancient tragic performance. It focuses on four different aspects of space which the contemporary actor of ancient plays needs to be

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attuned to in order to understand their challenges and possibilities. These four are: mimetic space, transformational space, community space, and agonistic space.

6.3   Mimetic Space The term ‘mimetic’ space refers to the fictive locale of a given play,7 and the way in which this is made present to a theatre audience.8 It denotes the place where tragedy’s onstage characters consider themselves to be at the moment they are speaking—whether this be the lonely rock among the heights of the Caucasus ranges where Aeschylus’ Prometheus is chained, or the Corinthian street where Euripides’ Medea bewails her outsider status as a barbarian stranger. One of the most important ways in which a sense of spatial mimesis was achieved in ancient tragedy was through the (explicit or implicit) re-identification of familiar elements of the Theatre of Dionysus’ performance space. So, for instance, the watchman whose speech opens the trilogy of plays known as the Oresteia begins by announcing: A long year now I’ve had the night watch: A huddled dog on the palace roof. Home of the sons of Atreus! (trans. Raphael & McLeish, 5).

In a few brisk lines, an ancient spectator is informed that they are to understand the empty stage-space before them as representing the city of Argos, the skene as the palace of Agamemnon (son of Atreus), and its upper platform as the roof of the palace. Different parts of the space are given specific identities in relation to the drama that’s about to play out. But the dramatic re-identification of different elements of the theatre could be much more sophisticated and ambitious than this. In 1978, Oliver Taplin’s Greek Tragedy in Action offered a groundbreaking analysis of this process, explaining (for example) how the familiar skene door (often used to represent a palace or royal dwelling) becomes, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a symbolically loaded locale: Aeschylus exploits the association in Greek society between the house and the household, the family and the family property, to make the house itself a brooding presence, an integral and fixedly disturbing background to the drama. (1985, 32)

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In the Agamemnon, the king of Argos returns to his home after a 10-year absence, following his destruction of the city of Troy. He expects his homecoming to be an occasion for celebration and happy reunion, but his wife, Clytemnestra, remembering how her husband sacrificed their eldest daughter at the beginning of hostilities, and (in her husband’s long absence) having taken his cousin and rival to her bed, has other plans. This is what is called a nostos (or ‘return’) tragedy, in which familiar spaces— especially those in which women have been left unsupervised for extended periods—turn out to be perilous, unknown territories (Hall 2010, 128–34).9 In Aeschylus’ play, the threshold which the homecoming king must cross to re-enter his own palace is both guarded and controlled by Clytemnestra. She makes her first entrance from the palace, through the skene doors, and in so doing effectively asserts her ownership of this area of the stage. The queen is also capable of turning her control of the king’s threshold to sinister purpose, as she authoritatively stage-manages her husband’s triumphal entry: My lord, step down from your chariot. But let the foot that trampled Troy Never step on common clay. Slaves, be quick: Spread tapestries in his way. Let the great king Walk a crimson pathway to the home He never hoped to see. A crimson path! His just reward; now justice shall be done. (trans. Raphael & McLeish, 28)

The queen calls for blood-coloured fabrics to line Agamemnon’s path from chariot to threshold,10 in a moment which brings multiple narrative and symbolic associations to bear. In ordering the unrolling of these cloths, Clytemnestra publicly incites her husband to perform an impious act (only a barbarian, he argues, would presume to trample underfoot cloths fit for the gods). But the sanguinary fabrics also symbolically presage the bloody fate that awaits the king beyond the doors of his palace. In this moment, as Taplin observes: ‘Agamemnon is as good as dead. As he tramples the precious fabric we know we are seeing him for the last time in a vivid prevision of his death’ (82–3). Taplin’s academic explorations re-discovered Greek tragedy as a theatre of visual eloquence, where a dramatic character’s identity is profoundly informed by their occupation of, and travel through, stage-space.

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However, as this example indicates, it can be hard to untangle tragedy’s mimetic space (the real doorway designated, for the duration of the drama, as the threshold of Agamemnon’s palace) from more symbolically charged uses of the same spaces (the unrolling of a carpet of blood-coloured fabric that makes an unspoken comment about character relationships, and future events).11 In the Agamemnon, the homecoming king is unwillingly accompanied by Cassandra, formerly a Trojan princess, now a slave. Cursed by Apollo, Cassandra can foresee the future, and to her heightened senses the mimetic spaces of the play’s action take on a very different aspect. Looking at skene and doorway, which to the other actors and the chorus signify a palace, she sees a place of bloodshed and terror, literally flowing with blood: No! a house cursed by the gods, A slaughterhouse! Heads cut off … Children killed … blood crimsoning the ground …. (trans. Raphael & McLeish, 33)

The extra-mimetic perception her curse imposes also allows her to identify the presence of the Furies, supernatural monsters who will go on to play an important role in the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides, but who are not yet physically present onstage: Above this house there hangs a raucous choir, Furies clamorous with malice, Plump with human blood. They dance Sarabands of death in the palace halls. Furies of the house of the sons of Atreus. (trans. Raphael & McLeish, 37)

Cassandra’s vision, disrupting the mimetic conventions which govern other performers’ responses to this space, conveys a different kind of dramatic truth, in which bloody acts committed in the past (the cannibal banquet with which Atreus presented his brother) combine with present and future horrors (a wife stabbing her bathing husband, Cassandra’s own imminent death) to create an alarmingly vivid re-visualization of palace as reeking charnel house.12 Cassandra’s vision of the Agamemnon’s skene/ palace demonstrates that space in ancient tragedy was always liable to imaginative transformations, and that the modern performer of ancient

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plays needs to be poised to engage with sudden, sometimes disorientating shifts between tragedy’s ‘mimetic’ and ‘transformational’ spaces.

6.4   Transformational Space As Chap. 5 demonstrated, the spoken and sung text of tragedy was able to evoke sights and experiences which significantly exceed the mimetic locations represented within a given tragic drama.13 The term ‘transformational space’ is borrowed from David Wiles, who proposes that one of the major roles of tragedy’s actors—and especially, its choruses—is ‘to effect spatio-temporal transformations’ (1997, 114). That is to say, the actors of tragedy have to be able to make geographically and temporally distant events imaginatively ‘visible’ to a theatre audience. He gives the example of a choral ode from the beginning of Agamemnon, which describes the sacrificial murder of the king’s eldest daughter, slain in exchange for fair winds to speed the Greek fleet to Troy: Her prayers, her cries, her virgin youth Counted for nothing. The warriors would have their war. The ritual began. Father, priest, king, he prayed the prayers, Commanded attendants to swing her up, Like a goat, over the altar, Face down, A gag on her lovely lips In case she spoke ill-omened words, And cursed the royal house. (trans. Raphael and McLeish, 10)

In Wiles’ analysis, passages like this can be understood as ‘reenactment’, with the chorus’ vocal and physical performance effecting ‘a kind of flashback’ to another time and place (1997, 17).14 In such moments, the moving bodies of the chorus, alluding to (and perhaps literally re-performing) longago acts, create an imaginative fusion of mimetic and unseen locales, temporarily activating the tragic stage as an unstable, transformational space. This flexible approach to space and time is particularly a feature of Aeschylus’ plays, which traverse a range of historical, mythic, and contemporary time scales, although comparable moments of spatio-temporal transformation are often to be found in the messenger speeches of

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Sophocles and Euripides (Wiles 1997, 17–18). The Oresteia itself ranges daringly from the half-mythic fall of Troy to the historical founding of murder trials in Athens. The third play of the trilogy, Eumenides,15 focuses upon Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who has avenged his father’s death by killing his mother, and is consequently hunted by the Furies. This drama begins outside Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, where the fugitive has come seeking purification, but the action rapidly shifts to Athens, where a trial is held to adjudicate the rival arguments of Orestes and his supernatural pursuers. This play’s chorus of Furies, aggrieved, assertive, and highly mobile, offer a striking example of the dramatic potentials of ancient tragedy’s transformational space.16 At the beginning of the Eumenides, Apollo’s priestess defines the mimetic space of the drama by welcoming visitors to the shrine she tends, but her authority (and the play’s mimetic space) is immediately undermined by what she sees when she attempts to pass through the skene door, and enter her domain: There At the omphalos, navel of the Earth, Sat a man, a suppliant: polluted, Sitting on the throne, defiled of god. Blood drips from his hands, his sword. In his other hand an olive-branch, tufted with wool As custom demands. But there Over there, close by him, Asleep, sprawled on the thrones … Are they women? Gorgons? Worse than Gorgons … […] Black, unwinged, vomit-vile. They snort, their breath is poison, Pus oozes from their eyes. (trans. Raphael & McLeish, 94)

The Furies simultaneously invade Apollo’s sacred space, trespassing against the rules of the place, and disrupt the mimetic decorums of the shrine’s theatrical representation. In fright and horror, the priestess loses physical self-control: ‘I can’t walk, can’t stand. /I scuttle … hands and knees … /A witless old women, crawling …’ (94). Mimetic space becomes transformational space as the monstrous contortions of this actor’s body give physical presence to a choral group who have not yet become visible to the play’s audience.

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The Eumenides’ chorus of Furies are recurrently associated with moments of transformational spatial practice, when dramatic place and location become unstable or fluid. At the play’s close, as the Furies agree to make peace with Athene and Athens, who bestow upon them a new, beneficent task and title, they are gifted with scarlet robes, and led in celebratory procession to their new homes below the city (125–6).17 It is likely that this closing sequence strongly resembled the real-world ritual of the Panathenaia, a festival in honour of Athene, which included a torchlit procession with metics (the city’s resident foreigners) wearing distinctive red cloaks. As the trilogy reaches its climax, with hymns sung to Athene, and the goddess promising her special blessings upon her city, while both performers and spectators are encouraged to ‘echo this our song’ (126), formal distinctions between the fictive world of the drama and contemporary Athens begin to fade, and the play’s performance space is transformed into a celebratory mirror-image of the festive city. As Wiles observes, ‘Aeschylus’ medium had infinite possibilities for the transformation of space, moment by moment’ (1997, 119).

6.5   Community Space To sit in the theatron, watching a tragedy, was to engage in interpreting a fluid, multi-layered performance environment, whose actors were capable of negotiating flexibly between mimetic and transformative spatial practices. Yet, the meanings and associations of tragic space cannot be limited to events unfolding onstage. In fifth-century Athens, tragic performance was always situated within a broader context of religious, civic, and agricultural festivities. These wider contexts played a crucial role in defining the meaning(s) of tragic space, and the symbolic and sensory experience of theatregoing in the ancient city. Therefore it’s important to understand tragic scenography as encompassing not just the imaginary locales evoked within tragic drama, but also the real public spaces within which tragedy’s mythic narratives were acted.18 As has already been mentioned, the major cultural context for the performance of tragedy was the Great Dionysia, a festival in honour of the god of wine and theatre which took place annually in the spring (Rehm, 45).19 Ritual preparations for this city-wide celebration began before any actors set foot within the orchestra, with a sacred image of Dionysus being carried through the streets to the theatre that bore his name. The following day, a mass procession of Athens’ inhabitants wound its way towards

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the Acropolis, this moving spectacle incorporating the sponsors and performers of forthcoming tragedies, as well as the thousand choral dancers about to perform in dithyrambs (collective songs in praise of the gods). Citizens carried loaves of bread and skins filled with wine, while outsiders, Athens’ foreign-born residents, bore bowls in which the liquor would be mixed. Phallic images were carried on behalf of Athens’ subject cities (also reminding celebrants of a cautionary tale about the consequences of disregarding Dionysus). At the front of the procession, a young woman walked, her basket of spring fruit a symbol of fertility, while among the men, sacrificial bulls were led; the beasts whose spilled blood was necessary to ensure an auspicious beginning to the festival.20 Once the temple of Dionysus was reached, the bulls would be sacrificed by priests skilled in ritual blood-letting, and their bodies divided into portions according to custom.21 To the gods went the bones and the fat, burnt on open fires so the scent of the offering would rise to reach divine nostrils. The rest of the meat was shared among Athens’ citizens, so that the religious ritual became a communal banquet, followed by collective wine-drinking, as well as more songs and dances. Only on the next day did dramatic performances begin. The theatre was open to the elements, meaning that beneath spring skies, festive playgoers could also look down upon and contemplate their city. The curved contours of the Theatre of Dionysus also gave each spectator a view of thousands of gathered citizens and neighbours, his fellow participants in the democratic ritual of theatregoing. These were part of ‘the spatial field of the performance’ (Wiles 1997, 212), and their presence could explicitly become part of the play’s mythic narrative, as when Athene addresses the city of Athens in the final stages of Eumenides (Raphael & McLeish, 110; 125). Even when not directly addressed, ‘the spectator’s gaze encompassed both the dramatic action and the assembled polis, and the response of the polis to the dramatic action was part of the individual’s experience’ (Wiles 1997, 210). When the city watched tragedy, it was simultaneously watching itself. Edith Hall makes the further argument that active mental engagement with tragic plots was part of the education of the democratic citizen, learning to make judgements about a range of intractable legal, military, or ethical issues through dramatic representations of comparably fraught situations (2010, 63–9). So it might also be said that during performances of tragedy, the city was watching itself think. In this way, Athens’ tragic theatre can be understood as part of an elaborate, deliberate process of

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‘communal self-display and self-definition’ (Wiles 1997, 27). Performances of tragedy were embedded within a festival which was simultaneously a religious ritual, an assertion of cultural superiority, a training in democratic problem-solving, and a celebration of the unique social relationships which defined the Athenian polis.22

6.6   Agonistic Space The Theatre of Dionysus was an important venue for the public expression of the ancient city’s shared cultural and political values, but that’s only part of the picture. Athens was also a city whose people were devoted to contests, debates, and public wrangles of all kinds, from the assembly and the law courts to the gymnasium and the battlefield, and in his chapter ‘Deep Plays’, Paul Cartledge argues that the city was defined by ‘a mentality of agonia’ (1997, 11). The word agon lies at the root of the modern English word ‘agony’, and the Greek meant a contest or a struggle (often, as current usage suggests, a painful one). It was a term once primarily associated with wrestling matches, but which had (by the fifth century) come to describe the broader range of competitive struggles taking place within the democratic city.23 In Performing Antagonism (2017), Tony Fisher identifies the ‘public realm’ of the ancient polis as ‘an agonistic space’ (2017, 10), describing Athens’ tragic drama as ‘a site in which the agō n was revealed, performed’ and ‘collectively experienced’ (2017, 10). In theatre history, the term agon is primarily used to  refer to two speeches of equal length, delivered by characters presenting fiercely opposed points of view. When (in the passage discussed above) Clytemnestra attempts to persuade her returning husband to tread on the blood-­ coloured fabrics she lays out before him, and he counters that such ­sacrilege would be behaviour worthy of a barbarian, not a civilized Greek, the two are engaged in an agon (one of the most famous in the tragic canon). It has been widely observed that this dramaturgical device closely mirrors the real-life procedures of the city’s law courts, where litigants competed to produce powerful and affecting speeches, which would elicit the sympathy of jurors,24 and Hall identifies agonistic encounter as a key characteristic of the city’s legal, political, and dramatic institutions (2006, 354). However, the fact that the word also continued to be used to describe physical struggles, like those that took places in boxing or wrestling matches, suggests another way in which agonistic principles may have been at work within performances of tragedy.

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Bearing in mind the ancient city’s delight in displays of physical competition, it is equally valid to conceptualize the physical scores of tragic performance, and the ways in which ancient drama’s protagonists and choruses occupy and contest stage-space, as agonistic. In Tragedy in Athens, David Wiles envisages actors competing for control of the ‘strongest points’ of their theatrical space (1997, 79), their individual and massed movements mapping the ebb and flow of a given tragic narrative’s emerging power play.25 Tragedy was always embedded within an explicitly competitive structure. Each playwright selected to produce work for the Great Dionysia was required to submit four plays (three tragedies and a satyr play), which would be judged against the tetralogies of his peers. At the end of three days of performances, votes were cast, and prizes were awarded, making the performance of tragedy just as competitive an event as an athletic race or archery contest (though arguably, for its performers, more physically gruelling than either). It might not be such a stretch, then, to consider the spatial relations of Athens’ tragedies as being permeated by agonistic principles, with performers giving physical embodiment to a play’s intense conflicts, debates, and confrontations (Harrop 2018). Certainly, extant tragedy is full of arguments, contests, and symbolic struggles for spatial authority. As has already been indicated, the Oresteia’s chorus of Furies are serial trespassers of forbidden, sacred space, whose unwelcome presence elicits this outburst from the god Apollo: Out! Out! Out! This is sacred ground, The home of prophecy. Out! The golden bow draws back To fire. In agony, would you choke Black vomit sucked from your victims, Puke curded blood? Out! This is not your place. (trans. Raphael & McLeish, 98–9)

Even this threat of divine violence, however, is not enough to drive the Furies away, and they linger to debate (at some length) Apollo’s claim of Olympian superiority, before departing from one contested area of stage-­ space only to challenge Orestes’ occupation of another sanctuary site. Throughout the Oresteia, and Aeschylus’ output more broadly (including, as explored earlier, the Suppliant Women), different characters’ and groups’

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occupation and traversal of stage-space is often a cue for intense dramatic struggle, played out through the bodies, as well as the words, of tragedy’s performers. In summary, tragic performance space was a flexible and rich resource for Athenian theatre-makers, offering great scope for artful negotiation between different spatial registers, and unpredictable transformations. But much of the detail of ancient spatial practice is irrecoverably lost. And even were it not, modern theatre spaces are so physically and culturally remote from the fifth-century Theatre of Dionysus as to make the direct transfer of specific choreographies a practical impossibility. In Greek Tragedy in Action, Oliver Taplin famously remarked that one of the major problems facing would-be producers of Greek plays today is that of situating ‘[r]ound plays in square theatres’ (172). However, this oft-quoted phrase significantly underplays the scale of the challenge, not least in its assumption that the natural home for ancient plays today is within the walls of a proscenium theatre. By contrast, David Wiles conceptualizes the spatial dynamics of Athenian tragedy as an ongoing challenge, which requires that later theatre-­makers embark upon their own, multiple processes of negotiation, transformation, and (re)interpretation. Eschewing attempts at archaeological fidelity, or simplistic assumptions about the desirability of transferring ancient spatial principles directly into twentieth-century theatre spaces, Wiles instead proposes that a ‘process of renewal’ is always ­necessary (2000, 127). In re-staging ancient tragedy today, contemporary theatre-­ makers have to begin by creating new spatial vocabularies to help tackle the job. The remainder of this chapter explores some of the ways in which contemporary acting and theatre-making practices can create new analogues for, and responses to, ancient spatial practice. It focuses on a series of key questions. Key Questions: • How can the contemporary performer of tragedy become more attuned to the genre’s spatial relationships, transformations, and contestations? • How can the modern actor explore the potential of tragedy’s spatial transformations within found or non-theatrical spaces? • How can the agonistic qualities of tragedy’s spatial interactions be activated in contemporary theatre-making?

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6.7   Acting Space: The Challenges in Context The playing spaces and spatial practices described so far in this chapter are those of Athens in the fifth century BCE, but (as already discussed in Chap. 2) these did not persist into the Hellenistic age. In A Short History of Western Performance Space (2003), Wiles describes how, in fourth-­ century performances of classical plays, ‘the actors stood as if in relief on a narrow stage, and the empty space of the orchestral circle created aesthetic distance’ between the world of gods and heroes, and that of spectators (2003, 211–12).26 This arrangement was still exerting an influence on staging conventions in sixteenth-century Italy, where ancient tragedy provided the plots for some of the first operas, whose singers occupied a narrow stage-space between a lavishly pained perspectival backdrop, and the orchestra (the term now used in its modern sense, to denote a group of musicians). The nineteenth century brought its own revolution in theatre space, with artists increasingly seeking to create an ‘illusion of reality’ onstage. In An Actor’s Work, Stanislavski directly references ancient Greek theatre in formulating the maxim ‘acting is action—mental and physical’ (Benedetti, 40). But the exercises he subsequently presents to acting students focus on the faithful reproduction of everyday actions and proxemics, the kinds of behaviours that are ‘possible in the real world’ (48); often precisely the kinds of domestic interactions which Goldhill identifies as being absent from the physical scores of tragedy (82). The end of the century saw even more radical change, with naturalist theatre artists exploring the scientifically inspired notion that ‘people’s character and personality are formed by a combination of heredity and their social environment’ (Innes, 6). Therefore, the aim of naturalist stage-space became to ‘establish the particular environment of the character’ and ‘show the action of the environment on them’ (McKinney & Butterworth, 90). Realist stages focused audiences’ attention towards spaces where social problems could become the object of fascinated scrutiny, while actors’ physicality was correspondingly limited to credible re-enactments of everyday proxemics. Such realist models of theatre space have not necessarily provided receptive environments for ancient tragedy. In consequence, cultivating the kinds of spatial presence and practice which would enable later actors to physically inhabit ancient drama has proved an enduring challenge to theatre directors and actor-trainers. Perhaps the most important influence upon the re-articulation of ancient spatial practice in the later twentieth

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century was Jacques Lecoq, who created a series of chorus-based exercises for his acting students at the École Internationale de Théâtre (Paris).27 By the time he founded this school, Lecoq had already been movement director for productions of Electra, Ion, Hecuba, Seven Against Thebes, and Herakles at the ancient theatre of Syracuse (Italy), where he had begun to seek alternatives to the dominant practice of performing tragic chorus through highly formalized expressionist dance (Lecoq, 6–7).28 The exercises Lecoq collected in the volume The Moving Body therefore focus on the process of training actors to move freely, playfully, and co-operatively. He sets the tone for many physical theatre practices by asserting that ‘we enter a text through the body […] working through movement, we ask the actors to get to grips physically with the text, its images, its words, its dynamics’ (2002, 146).29 His exercises also help attune members of a tragic ensemble to one another’s spatial presence, and to the ways in which spatial relations shape dramatic meaning. The celebrated teacher wrote that, through tragedy, students ‘learn what it really means to be connected, both with the ensemble and with a space’ (135). In The Moving Body, Lecoq identifies the chorus as one of the most important components of his curriculum, asserting that: The chorus is the one essential element in clearing a genuine space for tragedy. A chorus is not geometric but organic. In just the same way as a collective body, it has its centre of gravity, its extensions, its respiration. It is a kind of living cell, capable of taking on different forms according to the situation in which it finds itself. (139)

He also poses a vital question: ‘What balance can be found, today, between a chorus and a hero?’ (137). Although Lecoq’s writing on Greek tragedy’s original spatial practices is rooted in some questionable assumptions,30 his actor-training pedagogy articulates a vision of tragedy’s spatial interactions as profoundly relational. In the essential series of exercises he calls A balanced stage (141–4), students are challenged to respond, with developing insight and sensitivity, to the spatial disturbances and imbalances created by others in the course of an increasingly complex set of physical sequences, which eventually evolve into recognizably tragic scenarios. Lecoq’s major insight is that the relationships of a tragic drama may be expressed spatially, through actors’ bodies in dynamic relation to one another, and to their shared environment. This understanding offers the modern theatre-maker an invaluable set of principles and practices

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which can be applied (and adapted) to the task of re-embodying ancient tragedy, and empowers the actor to explore physical presence in ways which go beyond realist physical scores. As the example of The Suppliant Women (discussed at the beginning of this chapter) indicates, the dramatic interplay between individual and collective has the potential to convey tragedy’s spatial confrontations and contestations in vivid and immediate ways. Other modern practitioners have also sought alternatives to the physical and spatial vocabulary of classic theatrical naturalism. In The Viewpoints Book (2005), Anne Bogart and Tina Landau explicitly frame the body of training and compositional techniques known as Viewpoints as responding to the widespread misapplication and ‘miniaturization’ of Stanislavski’s practices, which (particularly in American actor training) privileges psychological self-analysis over physical creativity and imaginative spontaneity (15–17).31 Viewpoints accordingly offers a challenge to the convention that onstage conversations must necessarily take place across ‘a polite twoor three-foot distance’, instead searching for—and empowering actors to experiment with—‘less polite but more dynamic distances of extreme proximity or extreme separation’ (11). The five Physical Viewpoints serve as focus for collective, playful engagement with the performance elements of Shape, Gesture, Architecture, Spatial Relationship, and Topography (9–12), using the sensory and tactile qualities of space and place, as well as somatic interactions with co-present artists, to sharpen participants’ awareness of theatre’s expressive resources. As in many acting disciplines, the ability to ‘simply react’ is key, although (unlike more narrowly psychological acting practices) the stimuli being reacted to primarily engage performers’ ‘kinaesthetic response’ (Climenhaga, 296): The actor brings attention to the world around them and the growing dynamic connection to others in the room, and out of that heightened presence, things happen. (297)

In this work, the inter-reaction and inter-responsiveness of performers’ bodies and the spaces they inhabit and explore is central to the collective creative process. Viewpoints practice can also be used to support the development of a ‘Play-World’, described by Bogart and Landau as ‘a set of laws belonging to your piece and no other’ (167).

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Every culture has its own rules, spoken or not, as does every household, every relationship, every landscape. Even theatre has its performative rules: face the audience, stand in the light, pause for a laugh. (167)

The ‘Play-World’ may be defined by costume, colour, texture, gesture (or any combination of these), but the notion also encompasses the rules and procedures which inform actors’ travel through the given space of a specific performance. Bogart and Landau expressly encourage the theatre-­ maker (or creative ensemble) to make ‘Play-World’ choices which transgress against standard theatrical and social protocols, approaching spatial conventions interrogatively, and asking: ‘Why? Says who?’ (167). In this way, the ‘heightened presence’ (Climenhaga, 297) and kinaesthetic responsiveness which such practices both demand and cultivate challenge the spatial conventions of realist theatre-making. Viewpoints is also striking for its emphasis on Architecture (one of the five Physical Viewpoints) as a potential stimulus for the actor. Instead of treating theatre buildings or rehearsal rooms as neutral containers, Viewpoints practice encourages an awareness of, and embodied response to, the spaces in which performance is created and shared (Bogart & Landau, 52–4; 192–3). In this approach, the interplay of scale and mass, the textures and patterns of floor and walls, the changing play of light and shadow, patches of colour, or everyday objects, are all re-discovered as potential provocations for creativity and performance-making. While not directly modelled on ancient theatre practice, this element of Viewpoints work can help contemporary artists to generate new equivalents for the acute sensitivity with which ancient playwrights located their work in relation to the topography and established landmarks of the Theatre of Dionysus. The notion that the contemporary performer of tragedy might need to be as receptive to architecture as to the bodies of other actors, or the rhythms and images of poetic text (see Chap. 4), is also crucial to the development of site-specific practice. In recent decades, performance-­ makers have embraced the many layers of history and memory evoked by landscapes, buildings, and public places, exploring the potentials of ‘real’ or ‘found’ space, and occupying locations beyond conventional theatre buildings where (as Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks explain in Theatre/ Archaeology) ‘multiple meanings and readings of performance and site intermingle’ (23). Such ‘site-specific’ works can give rise to complex new sensory and intellectual experiences of classical plays. Pearson and Shanks

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trace back to classical Greek antecedents site-specific theatre’s aspirations to undo the ‘sociofugal’ nature of much conventional theatre practice, still (implicitly) shaped by nineteenth-century pictorial and naturalist stages, and prone to ‘throwing spectators apart, limiting their eye contact, discouraging social interaction’ (108–9). According to this view, the ‘unhousing’ of performance through site-specific practice (Hannah in Pitches & Popat, 58) opens up new potentials for the theatre-maker’s spatial acuity and environmental responsiveness to shape the experience of both performers and audience-members: The feelings stimulated through site-specific work are evoked through an embodied response to the particular space. Often, it is precisely the richness of this phenomenological, multi-sensory experience of place that makes the event so memorable, as visual, aural, olfactory and tactile elements become an integrated and often heightened part of the audience experience. (Palmer in Pitches & Popat, 78)

Contemporary site-specific practice draws on phenomenological experiences of place which can resonate powerfully with the densely meaningful performance environment presented by the fifth-century Theatre of Dionysus. In 2010, Mike Pearson (formerly of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and Brith Gof, currently making work with Pearson/Brookes) created a site-­ specific version of Aeschylus’ Persians for the newly formed National Theatre Wales. The tragedy, the earliest surviving text from the Athenian canon (472 BCE), reflects on a recent Greek victory at the naval Battle of Salamis from the point of view of the defeated Persians. It depicts a global empire at a moment of transformative crisis, as the Persian queen endures a tragic messenger’s harrowing report from the front line, and the ghost of a former king prophesies further disaster to come. Pearson’s version of the Persians took its audiences into a usually inaccessible portion of the Welsh landscape: FIBUA (the acronym stands for ‘Fighting in Built-Up Areas’), a replica village built upon the remains of a real settlement where British Army service personnel are trained for urban combat (Pearson 2010, 135–7, 2012, 71). Reflecting on the interpretative choices involved in shaping an encounter between tragic myth and contemporary landscape, the director explains that the production chose to make ‘no direct thematic reference to either the troubled history of the landscape, or its contentious current usage’, instead generating a mood of ‘mutual haunt-

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ing’,32 potentially evoking a multi-layered awareness of the conflicts which have unfolded over and within the landscape(s) traversed, and which are encoded in multiple layers of history, memory, and myth (2012, 82–3). In Site-Specific Performance (2010), Pearson also prompts readers to consider the properties  of a given space: ‘How do the dimensions of individual rooms prescribe what might happen here? How are they linked? Is action simultaneous or sequential?’ (138) Through these questions, Pearson invites the contemporary theatre-maker to consider how a particular location might facilitate, constrain, or direct the movement of bodies through the narrative and duration of a performance, increasing their sensitivity to ways in which a real space (imbued with its own layers of history and meanings) and a mythic story (multiple, flexible, and shifting in emphasis across time, place, and context) might interact to generate unexpected new effects and meanings. In performances like National Theatre Wales’ The Persians, the physical expressivity and spatial eloquence which ancient performance conditions demanded of tragedy’s acting companies are channelled into new bodily disciplines, and a rich network of somatic, psychophysical, and environmental sensitivities. The performance spaces may be new (and perhaps unrecognizable as such to tragedy’s earliest practitioners), but Pearson’s performers share with Aeschylus’ acting companies a profound alertness to the creative potentials of the human body in motion and in relation to its environment, and of the spatial negotiations and confrontations through which ancient tragic narratives achieve embodied presence.

6.8   Acting Space: From the Studio The following provocations respond to some of the key challenges explored in this chapter, suggesting practical ways in which contemporary actors and theatre-makers can begin to explore the different kinds of space encoded in Greek tragedy. Different tasks invite you to foreground the mimetic, transformational, community-based, and agonistic qualities of ancient tragedy’s spaces, though the specific interplay between these within a given performance comes down to the creative choices made by each practitioner or company. A performance need not necessarily engage all four layers. Divergent spaces, contexts, and cultural/political considerations will confront groups of theatre-makers

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with very different opportunities and demands. You should make your choices about spatial relationships and encounters in ways which are mindful of your own particular settings and aims. Here, as in previous chapters, the point of this process is to help you develop your own, unique, approach to the re-­performance of ancient tragedy. 1. Mapping the Tragedy This exercise combines and adapts several Viewpoints exercises (Bogart & Landau, 127; 131; 149) to engage with the topographic features, and power dynamics, of a given tragedy’s mimetic spaces. It also encourages actors of tragedy to explore the importance of spatial presence and interactions, unfolding in time and space, within ancient dramaturgy. This exercise can be applied to any tragic drama you wish to explore. • As a group, examine your workspace or performance venue. What are the major features or quirks of its topography? Where are the most powerful locations? Where are its sheltered, hidden, or safe spaces? • Then work together to ‘map’ the key topographic landmarks of your tragic drama (e.g. palace roof, household doorway, shrine, sanctuary, or altar) onto your own space. What spatial correlations can you discover between the topography of tragedy and your working space? Which landmarks do you find it hard to place in a contemporary rehearsal or performance space? • Now, use a set of found objects (anything will do: shoes, water bottles, jumpers, simple props) to represent the characters of your tragedy. Work together to create a wordless composition using only these objects, carefully placed and re-placed in relation to your tragic topography, your working space, and one another, to dramatize the key spatial encounters and contestations of your chosen tragedy. Once this exercise is concluded, take some time to reflect on the experience. In what ways can present-day spaces offer topographical equivalents for the mimetic landscapes of ancient tragedy? How can placement, distance, and relational movement create dramatic meaning—even in the absence of human actors and spoken text?

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2. Mapping Relationships Drawing on the Viewpoints exercise called ‘Relationship Composition’ (Bogart & Landau, 172), this approach is particularly useful when applied to plays with a strong emphasis on inter-personal or family relationships. It’s great for dramas like Euripides’ Hippolytus, Helen or Alcestis, or Sophocles’ Ajax or Philoctetes. • The group divides into pairs, who should begin facing each other across the width of the rehearsal space or studio. All those standing on one side of the room are allocated one character, all those on the other side a second. • Each pair’s task is to devise a sequence of five still images, which conveys the progression of these characters’ relationship across the course of your chosen play. • Initially, each pair’s major focus should be on articulating different stages of a relationship through negotiations of proximity or distance, posture and gesture, though as the exercise develops (or is repeated), architecture, or light and shadow, may all come to inform participants’ creative choices. Take time to observe and reflect on each other’s work. Which moments best capture the essence of the tragic relationship being scrutinized? Which aspects of a relationship or narrative can be most powerfully expressed through spatial dynamics? How might particularly effective moments be translated into fully staged performance? This process can then be repeated with different pairs of characters, or used as a warm-up exercise to ‘check in’ on a company’s developing understanding of a drama’s key relationships 3. Tragic Topographies This exercise draws on the site-specific practices of artists like Mike Pearson, whose contemporary re-visionings of tragedy explore interactions between space, place, and stories (Pearson 2010, 138). Before you begin this work, you’ll need to identify a series of spaces you can safely access, explore, and create brief performances in. These may be rehearsal rooms, classrooms, corridors, storerooms, or offices—but the more layers of history, use, and identity present in each the better. You’ll also need to

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be familiar with the major acts, events, locales, and images of the tragic text you’ve chosen to explore. • As a group, take an exploratory tour of your found spaces. Explore the dimensions, topography, and tactile or sensory qualities of each. Consider the function or use of each space right now, but also what it may have been in the past. What layers of occupation and meaning can you trace in these everyday spaces? • Now consider each of your spaces in relation to the acts, events, and themes of the tragedy you’ve chosen to work on. Where can you identify topographic, sensory, or affective links between a particular space, and a given episode or element of your tragedy? Where might the layered histories of your spaces interact provocatively with aspects of an ancient drama? Where do ancient and modern narratives potentially interact with one another? • Once you’ve thoroughly explored these questions, create a performative journey through your spaces, using space, light, sound, objects, and sensory stimuli (but no live performers) to evoke a series of moments from your chosen tragedy. How much of your chosen drama can be evoked through these means alone? What new meanings or interpretations potentially arise from the interaction of ancient stories, and contemporary spaces or sites? • If you wish, you can also develop this exercise by adding a single performer to each space. What new conjunctions of narrative, symbol, and meaning become possible with the addition of a human performer? How can performed (spoken, sung, or embodied) text enrich the resonances you’re discovering between modern place/ space(s) and ancient tragic dramaturgy? This work is predicated on the notion that in site-specific practice, place and performance are capable of transforming one another, with multiple meanings and layers of story interacting in relation to a given locale. Throughout, you should aim to be attentive to Pearson’s question: ‘What narratives might be invoked here, what haunts the place’ (2010, 138)? 4. Processing As this chapter has outlined, performances of tragedy in fifth-century Athens were festive occasions, with performances framed and defined by

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civic, ritual, and political activities. Contemporary site-specific performance-­ makers have comparably experimented with creating events which engage spectators in active experiences, which can often involve apparently un-­ theatrical pleasures, risks, and encounters. Would-be spectators of Pearson’s The Persians, for instance, had to undertake a gruelling journey before they reached anything resembling theatrical performance: At 7pm the audience assembles at the central army base […] Each member of the audience is issued with a waterproof, windproof poncho and given stern warnings not to touch anything on the ground. They are transported by coach on a 20-minute journey to the village, across an unfamiliar and disorientating landscape […] As they disembark at the boundary chicane of FIBUA, a martial anthem plays in the distance. They walk through the empty village, passing burned-out military vehicles and closed, unpainted houses. (Pearson 2012, 74)

Pearson’s description evokes a growing mood of uncertainty and foreboding among participants as their journey progressed: ‘Are we a procession; a demonstration; tourists; weapons inspectors; the straggling survivors of conflict?’ (74–5). However, an audience’s pre-performance experience might equally be uplifting or celebratory; consider, for example, the excited laughter and chatter provoked by The Suppliant Women’s pre-show address and red-wine libation. In this exercise, you can choose to work with any tragedy, though you should be familiar with the drama’s plot, characters, major images, themes, or conflicts. • Design a route for audiences to walk before they encounter your performance (or imagined performance). Sketch a map of the journey your processing audience will experience, noting the particular places and spaces (real, or created) you want them to travel through, and the sequence in which you wish these encounters to take place. • Consider the sensory and affective experiences you wish the procession to activate. What do you want participants to see, feel, hear, smell, touch? Will they be offered food, drink, objects to handle? • Think, too, about the interactions which may take place during this journey. Will participants have tasks to perform, or unfamiliar customs and practices to observe? What will be the pace of your procession, and when/where do you want participants to pause? How do you want them to relate to, and interact with, one another? Who or what will greet them when they reach the performance space?

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• If possible, lead a group of volunteers (ideally not participants in your creative process) along your processional route, without telling them anything about your chosen play. At the end of this process, discuss this experience with your volunteers. What expectations did the walk give them about the performance to come? How did sensory encounters inform their sense of what might follow? How did the journey begin to shape (or, perhaps, re-shape) their relationships with one another? 5. Protagonist versus Chorus The next two exercises are adapted from Lecoq’s classic ‘A balanced stage’, though the UK company Complicité have also influenced their development.33 While Lecoq’s exercises aim at developing a harmonious set of proxemics between chorus and protagonist, the following two variants can produce a more spatially assertive ‘chorus’, eventually capable of taking direct, agonistic action to solve the spatial problems posed by a singular ‘protagonist’. • The whole group walks in the space, imagining that the floor of the room will tilt and tip if they do not maintain spatial ‘balance’ in their relative positions and trajectories. (Standing still in a fixed, balanced pattern is cheating—everyone in the group should always be in motion.) • At a given signal, one of the group becomes the ‘protagonist’, whose weight is taken to be equal to that of the rest of the group combined. The ‘protagonist’ may move as they choose through the space, without any requirement to behave co-operatively, or any concern with ‘balancing’ the floor. • The task of the rest of the group is to work out how to respond to and contain the danger posed by the spatial provocations of the singular ‘protagonist’. You can speak to each other if necessary, but you should aim to rely primarily on collective attention and physical quickness. In effect, this group becomes the ‘chorus’, acting co-­ operatively to respond to and contain the dangerous actions of the singular ‘protagonist’ figure. • In time, the ‘chorus’ may work out how to immobilize or entrap a particular ‘protagonist’, re-asserting their collective control of the

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space. This is a good sign, but swapping the identity of the ‘protagonist’ at regular intervals ensures that even an experienced ‘chorus’ is presented with a wide range of different spatial challenges. • It can also be useful to pause this exercise, from time to time, drawing attention to the characteristic shapes and configurations adopted by the ‘chorus’ in relation to their ‘protagonist’. These will vary from group to group, and can valuably form the basis for particular moments of tragic staging. After spending some time with this exercise, it can be helpful to reflect on the dramatic potentials of de-centring ‘harmony’ from spatial interactions between tragedy’s actors. How does it challenge preconceptions about choral roles if this group begins to become spatially assertive? How does this affect assumptions about ancient drama’s balance of power? How can exploring agonistic approaches to spatial interaction lend new moods and meanings to your explorations of tragedy in performance? As the example of The Suppliant Women suggests, the spatial authority and  potential agency of tragedy’s choral groups should never be underestimated. 6. Miasma This exercise draws on the ancient concept of miasma, a form of pollution usually resulting from irreligious or immoral acts which may initially affect a single individual, but which (like a contagious disease) can also be transmitted to family members or neighbours through unwary proximity to the guilty party. It is particularly useful for exploring dramatic moments when a single character is discovered to have performed a deed which places the safety of the wider community in jeopardy (Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone offer good examples) or when a suspect outsider is attempting to win over or placate a suspicious community. Before you begin work, you should select a speech in which this character attempts to justify themselves, or makes an appeal for support. • One performer takes the role of the polluted (or suspect) individual, the rest of the group represent the play’s chorus. At the start of the exercise, the group should spread out to occupy the whole room. • The individual performer should read their speech aloud, working to gain the trust, sympathy, and support of the listening community. In

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particular, they should strive to cultivate a sense of intimacy through physical proximity, moving around the space as they speak, seeking support and solidarity with others. • The role of the chorus, working together, is protect themselves from the miasma (pollution) potentially carried by the single, protagonist figure, by maintaining a safe distance at all times. This calls for intense concentration and teamwork, as the solitary figure may move suddenly or unexpectedly, and may even attempt to make physical contact with particular chorus members. • Take it in turns to assume the role of the single, speaking protagonist. What different spatial strategies can you use to build trust, and to make (or elude) physical contact? What’s it like to play the excluded outsider? As your group gains more experience of this exercise, the chorus may also choose to explore a wider range of spatial responsiveness, perhaps allowing some degree of proximity to a speaker they find persuasive, or banding together to exile another whose presence they judge to be excessively dangerous. The key point to remember is that in ancient tragic drama, spatial proximity has implications which exceed the everyday concerns of social convention or good manners, and which potentially risks the safety of a whole community.

6.9   Acting Space: Epilogue This chapter has highlighted the importance of spatial interactions between actor and actor, actor and chorus, and between a tragic acting company and its performance space or environment. Aristotle may have had little intellectual interest in the ‘spectacle’ of ancient performance, but the present exploration of multiple layers of spatial meaning has highlighted tragedy’s complex interplay between spatial mimesis, transformative fusions of seen and unseen space, the visual dynamics of a political community coming together, and the competitive spatial practices of a theatre culture addicted to agonistic struggle. In tragedy, the progress of a single figure along a blood-coloured carpet, or the image of many bodies combining forces in a celebratory, torchlit procession, are not just pretty additions to self-sufficient poetic texts. The city’s playwrights were skilled manipulators of theatre space, scenographers as well as performance-making poets. And tragedy’s ancient performers were required to be

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physically expressive and spatially acute, capable of using their (singular, massed, and relational) bodies as well as their voices to clarify and heighten every moment of a drama’s progress. The imaginative and physical demands presented by these ancient dramas inspired Lecoq to locate the form at the centre of his actor-training method, foregrounding spatial relations and interactions between the collective and the individual in a series of exercises which have proved deeply influential for present-day ensemble theatre. For later practitioners, the decision to place performers’ inter-reactive and spatially attuned bodies centre-stage has often been a deliberate reaction to the limitations of realist dramaturgy, with its prescribed range of proxemics (Bogart & Landau, 11) corresponding to the limitations of its Stanislavski-in-miniature psychological focus (15–17). In Viewpoints practice, relational, spatial, and environmental sensitivity replace character psychology as prompts for performance-­making, overturning the conventional primacy of the individual role (and actor), instead drawing creative power from the spontaneous co-creations of an improvising and composing group. Site-specific performance-making, too, places acutely sensitive interactions with, and within, real landscapes and sites at the heart of tragedy’s potential. Ancient Athens’ theatres were never solely illusionistic spaces, and projects like Pearson’s The Persians demonstrate the potential of site-specific work to creatively re-evoke some of Greek tragedy’s civic and ritual contexts, while bringing to light a provocative range of interactions between ancient mythic stories and  our own socially and historically inscribed locales (2010, 138, 2012, 70–2, 82–3). Such actor-training and theatre-making practices may seem a far cry from the immediate challenge facing the actor in the rehearsal room, struggling to make sense of the physical scores of ancient plays. However, as this chapter’s opening discussion of The Suppliant Women evidences, tragedy’s mimetic and transformative spatial dynamics, its relationship with co-present audiences, and its capacity to give embodied presence to intractable political debates, may all be activated at different moments within a single performance in response to, and in dialogue with, a range of contemporary spaces, places, and contexts. Of course, as the example of The Suppliant Women also demonstrates, it is impossible to fully explore the spatial relations of tragedy without considering the crucial presence of the tragic chorus, which forms the subject of the next chapter.

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Notes 1. Of this ancient trilogy, only one play survives, making it impossible to know for sure how the story was resolved by Aeschylus. 2. All references in this chapter are to Kenny (2013). 3. The absence of ancient evidence concerning the spaces of Athenian tragedy, and the specific ways in which they were occupied and traversed by performers, means drawing any firm conclusions concerning ancient performance is almost impossible. On the difficulties of interpreting surviving evidence, see Powers (11–23). 4. On costume in ancient tragedy, see Wyles (2011). 5. Some recent scholarship casts doubt on the theory that this space was circular during the fifth century. Hanink, for instance, asserts that ‘the word orkhestra is used of theatrical dancing space only after the emergence of round spaces during the fourth century’ (99). 6. This Greek word gives us the Latin phrase deus ex machina, commonly used to describe any plot-device in which an outside power suddenly intervenes to alter the outcome of a narrative. 7. The term mimesis appears in Aristotle’s Poetics, where it is used to describe the activities of different kinds of creative artists engaged in making likenesses of objects, people, or actions. Though it’s unclear exactly how the ancient philosopher defined the term, it’s usually translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’ (Kenny, xv–xvii). 8. Rush Rehm uses the term ‘scenic space’ to denote a comparable concept (20). The semiotic distinction between ‘mimetic’ and ‘diegetic’ space can be traced back to Michael Isaacharoff’s linguistic and semiotic studies, though the present chapter follows Wiles (1997, 16–18, 114–15) in resisting the assumption of a binary opposition between the two in performed Greek tragedy. Rehm also comments that tragedy ‘includes far more spatial play than is suggested by contemporary accounts of the onstage and offstage polarity’ (22). The following section (‘Transformational Space’) explicitly draws on Wiles’ contribution to this debate, and the terminology he formulates in Tragedy in Athens (1997, especially chapter 5). 9. For a more developed discussion of tragedy as a ‘space for returns’, see Rehm (chapter 2). 10. The terms used to describe colours in ancient Greece differ from our own, making direct translations of visual descriptions challenging. Taplin explains that the fabrics unrolled on Clytemnestra’s orders have been ‘dipped in the expensive purple dye derived from shellfish, porphyra’ (80). However, the play’s poetic symbolism also makes it clear that this colour is redolent of spilled blood, prompting many English translators to stress this aspect of its appearance. On ancient Greek conceptualization of colour, see Sassi (2017).

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11. Bakola (169–71) explores the symbolic potentials of the figures who bear the blood-coloured fabrics. 12. See also Rehm (79–80). 13. Rehm uses the term ‘extrascenic’ space for unseen locations, which are imagined to be just offstage, while more far-off locations are termed ‘distanced space’ (21–2). 14. One later rhetorician described a dancer in an Aeschylus play as having ‘such artistry that […] he made all the actions clear through dance’ (Wiles 1997, 119). The choral dances of Athenian tragedy are irrecoverably lost, but they clearly played a major role in the visual spectacle and spatial meaning of plays. 15. This Greek title means ‘Kindly Ones’, alluding to the new role the Furies will be granted at the close of the play. In English-language theatre it is common for the play to be re-named The Furies, highlighting the dramatic importance of this choral group to the play’s narrative. 16. For an imaginative reconstruction of the full range of this chorus’ transformative ‘appearances’, see Bakola (2018). 17. The presentation of these red robes dramaturgically balances (and perhaps symbolically resolves) Clytemnestra’s earlier deployment of blood-coloured textiles. 18. This interpretation of tragic space runs counter to many classic readings of ancient plays, which conceptualize their stages as self-contained representational space. For an extended critique of this position, see Wiles (1997, 201–21). 19. Other, smaller festivals punctuated the Athenian calendar, including the Lenaia (a winter festival) and the Rural Dionysia (associated with Athens’ different districts), at which plays were also performed. 20. See further Wiles (1997, 26–7) and Rehm (44–6). 21. The tragic skene backed onto to this sacrificial precinct, so that when Aeschylus’ Agamemnon made his final journey, he was travelling along an axis which led him directly towards a familiar site of slaughter. Wiles (1997, 58). 22. It is important not to idealize Athens’ democracy (the city’s slaves, women, and foreigners were all ruthlessly excluded from the self-determination enjoyed by citizen males), or to overstate the potential of tragic plays (both then and now) to inculcate democratic virtues. See further Laera (14–16, 41–3) and Ridout (19–25), both of whom draw on Settis (2006). 23. For this term’s evolution, see Wallace (2007, 11). 24. Interactions between the Athenian lawcourts and tragic writing/performance are discussed in Hall (2006, 355; 366–8; 382–7). 25. Wiles speculates that this interplay might be read as ‘the spatial correlative of democracy’ (1997, 109), a theory developed further in Harrop (2018).

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26. Wiles dates this practice to the fourth century BCE (1997, 16), and interprets the high stage of the Hellenistic period as placing a new dramatic focus upon ‘individual psychologies’ at the expense of collective, civic selfscrutiny (1997, 36). He further contends that this practice may have come about when the roof of a fifth-century stage building (formerly associated with gods, or quasi-divine presences) came to be used as the standard platform for all principal performers (1997, 53). 27. On Lecoq’s career and legacies, see Murray (2003, 2010), and Evans & Kemp (2016). 28. Many of the pioneering artists exploring tragic space in the early twentieth century were dancers, whose work lies beyond the scope of this volume. For a full discussion of modern dance and Greek tragedy, see Macintosh (2010). 29. For a series of Lecoq-inspired exercises which focus on physicalizing tragedy’s texts, and choral speaking, see Murray (2003, 140–6). 30. Throughout The Moving Body, Lecoq insists that the playing space for some of his most famous choral exercises ‘must be rectangular’, expressing a distaste for circular performance spaces (141). He also works from the premise of physical distance between the chorus and a tragedy’s protagonists, taking as a given the (probably Hellenistic) principle that ‘the Greek chorus was not on the same level of the actors’ (140). 31. The name ‘Viewpoints’ was first devised by choreographer Mary Overlie, and many practitioners have contributed to the development of this approach. Bogart & Landau (2005, 3–6). See also Climenhaga (295–6). 32. This phrase adapts a common conceptual trope in site-specific theatre. See Tompkins (2012, 7–10). 33. For a discussion of Complicité and Lecoq, see Murray (2003, 95–126).

References Bakola, E. 2018, ‘Daimones Between the Visible and the Invisible: Interior Spaces and Uncanny Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, in E. Bakola & S. Lunn-Rockliffe (eds), Locating Daimones in the Ancient Greek World, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 163–86. Benedetti, J.  2008, Konstantin Stanislavski: An Actor’s Work, Routledge, Abingdon. Bogart, A. & Landau, T. 2005, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition, Theatre Communications Group, New York. Cartledge, P. 1997, ‘“Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life’, in P.E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3–35.

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Climenhaga, R. 2010, ‘Anne Bogart and SITI Company: Creating the Moment’, in A. Hodge (ed.), Actor Training, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 288–304. Evans, M. & Kemp, R. (eds). 2016, The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, Routledge, Abingdon. Fisher, T. 2017, ‘Introduction: Performance and the Tragic Politics of the Agō n’, in T.  Fisher & E.  Katsouraki (eds), Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 1–24. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Hall, E. 2006, The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions Between Ancient Greek Drama and Society, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hall, E. 2010, Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hanink, J. 2014, Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hardwick, L. 2010, ‘Negotiating Translation for the Stage’, in E. Hall & S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 192–207. Harrop, S. 2018, ‘Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 99–114. Innes, C. 2000, A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, Routledge, London. Kenny, A. (trans.). 2013, Aristotle: Poetics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Laera, M. 2013, Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Peter Lang, Bern. Lecoq, J.  2002 [2000], The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, Methuen, London. Macintosh, F. (ed.). 2010, The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, Oxford University Press, Oxford. McKinney, J. & Butterworth, P. 2009, The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Monaghan, P. 2010, ‘“Spatial Poetics” and Greek Drama: Scenography as Reception’, in E.  Hall & S.  Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, Duckworth, London, pp. 241–51. Murray, S. 2003, Jacques Lecoq, Routledge, Abingdon. Murray, S. 2010, ‘Jacques Lecoq, Monika Pagneux and Philippe Gaulier: Training for Play, Lightness and Disobedience’, in A.  Hodge (ed.), Actor Training, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 215–36. Pearson, M. 2010, Site-Specific Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Pearson, M. 2012, ‘Haunted House: Staging The Persians with the British Army’, in A.  Birch & J.  Tompkins (eds), Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 69–83.

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Pearson, M. & Shanks, M. 2001, Theatre/Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues, Routledge, Abingdon. Pitches, J.  & Popat, S. 2011, Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Powers, M. 2014, Athenian Tragedy in Performance: A Guide to Contemporary Studies and Historical Debates, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City. Raphael, F. & McLeish, K. (trans.). 1991, Aeschylus: Oresteia, Methuen, London. Rehm, R. 2002, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Ridout, N. 2013, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Sassi, M.M. 2017, ‘The Sea Was Never Blue’, Aeon, viewed 29 January 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-hope-to-understand-how-the-greeks-sawtheir-world. Settis, S. 2006, The Future of the ‘Classical’, Polity Press, Cambridge. Taplin, O. 1985 [1978], Greek Tragedy in Action, Methuen, London. Tompkins, J.  2012, ‘The “Place” and Practice of Site-Specific Theatre and Performance’, in A. Birch & J. Tompkins (eds), Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 1–20. Wallace, J. 2007, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 1997, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2000, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2003, A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wyles, R. 2011, Costume in Greek Tragedy, Bristol Classical Press, London.

CHAPTER 7

Acting Chorus

7.1   From the Auditorium: Enter the Chorus A bare stage, a veil of wispy light, and a ramp that passes from view to an off-stage mythical world. Something momentous is signalled in the production’s scenography, anticipating the entrance of the tragedy’s titular chorus. I am sitting in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre, London, partly modelled on the ancient theatre at Epidauros.1 I’ve come to see Peter Hall’s production of Euripides’ Bacchai (2002). Hall’s productions of tragedy have consistently caused debate among theatre-makers and classicists, on account of his trademark focus on the chorus, and his use of masks. For Hall, the mask is the thing; when the actor’s face is replaced with the mask, an audience’s ears and eyes, he believes, will be drawn to the striking form of the ancient play and the meaning conveyed in the ancient dramatist’s writing (Hall 2000). So when a masked chorus of maenads—the ecstatic worshippers of Dionysus— writhingly descend the slopes of mount Cithaeron (down the ramp) to join the actor Greg Hicks’ lithe, masked Dionysus, my eyes and ears are immediately struck by two things. First, by Colin Teevan’s rhythmic and modern sounding translation of Euripides intoned, at times, by the chorus in unison, but sometimes, eerily, by individualized voices speaking through the mask. And second, by the chorus’ earth-red Afghan burkas, a problematic nod to Asian-ness, reinforced by Harrison Birtwistle’s orchestration of lugubrious bass clarinets, piercing oboes, and Asiatic drum rhythms. To me, many of these musical and visual choices seem to evoke the idea of ritual possession, further reinforced by the ancient Greeks’ use of masks in the theatre sanctuary of Dionysus. © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_7

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But I fail to be  transported  except as an onlooker  curious about Hall’s masked figures, enmeshed in the prescriptive folds of their director’s theory, which only achieve a textbook approximation of the ancient play’s ecstatic transformations. A few years later, and I am back at the National Theatre, encountering the heightened naturalism of Katie Mitchell and Struan Leslie’s choruses of women in two Euripides plays staged in the neighbouring Lyttleton Theatre. This time, instead of veils and masks I encounter a very different set of choral aesthetics and practices. In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (2004, first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 2001), and Women of Troy (2007), the chorus of women represent the witnesses, and bartered spoils, of war. The chorus in each of the plays are identifiably from a genteel class: in Iphigenia in Aulis, they are elegantly dressed women clutching gleaming handbags and, in Women of Troy, party guests come unmoored from their privileged  lifestyle, still clad in their evening dresses. Their herded sense of despair, twitchy and defensive, occasionally reverts to ritual civility (the putting on of make-up, the sudden lift into an improvisatory waltz). At first glance, they may not seem to bear much relation to the choruses of antiquity, as deliberately evoked in Hall’s classically masked productions. Yet these choruses represent a form of ‘radical naturalism’ (Solga, 150), in which the conflict between inner flight-or-fight (or freeze) impulses, and outward gentility, unnervingly shade into each other, undoubtedly creating a psychophysical phenomenon.

7.2   Acting Chorus: An Introduction Any mention of the tragic chorus is apt to invite visions of men (or women) in toga-like garments, adopting stylized poses, their faces hidden by sombre masks. Such ersatz ideas form part of most people’s residual memories, unconsciously gleaned perhaps from humble amateur dramatic encounters with tragedy, images of Greek theatre in painting or on art objects, or irreverent pop-culture references. Those who have developed their understanding of the chorus through cinematic or musical theatre paradigms may recall the celluloids of Busby Berkeley (1895–1976), in which a chorus-­ like ensemble of young women is geometrized (and certainly objectified by the male gaze), or the singular sensation of Broadway’s singing and dancing choruses in works like A Chorus Line (1975) (Dunbar 2010).2 The operatic chorus, corps de ballet, the choruses of oratorios, or even church choirs may also be looked to as models for a chorus that speaks, sings, or dances in a coordinated and unified way. In some cultures, chorus-like manifestations

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may also be observed in the formal singing and dancing groups who maintain a communal or religious function, like the Ngqoko Cultural Group, who famously formed the chorus of Yaël Farber’s Molora, a South African adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.3 From whatever source these notions concerning choruses are drawn, a rehearsal-room encounter with this key element of ancient dramaturgy is likely to prove troubling to the actor whose naturalistic inclinations place the psychological narratives of a play’s major dramatic characters at the heart of tragedy’s meaning. As Simon Goldhill notes: […] every modern production has to face the acute problem of what to do with a group of people onstage throughout even the most intimate exchanges of husband and wife, a group which has long odes in dense lyric poetry to deliver between the scenes of actors acting and events happening. (45)

As a result, the chorus (including its dense, intertextual narratives/ songs/dances) often ends up being jettisoned altogether, or represented by singular, peripheral, figures (64–6). However, as this chapter will argue, such modern anxieties about staging the chorus may not be the whole story. To the psychophysically attuned contemporary actor, their practice often enriched with some experience of ensemble work, this ancient convention may actually present a positive stimulus for developing their own, uniquely calibrated, negotiations between mind and body, psychology and somatics, individual and collective creativity. The chorus has its origins in ritual choral singing, which predates the development of tragedy.4 However, by the fifth century BCE, the ­theatrical chorus had been formalized into a selected group of skilled amateur performers, who undertook rigorous and extended training. The chorus sang and danced together, choreographed and orchestrated to clearly and precisely intone and perform the complex rhythms of Greek tragedy in a vast outdoor performance space. According to traditional accounts of tragedy’s development, the chorus was initially made up of 50 men (precisely the number who sang and danced in the Great Dionysia’s dithyramb), before shrinking to 12 or 15 (Wiles 2000, 133–4). In each play, the tragic chorus was expected to participate in various song-and-dance performances, typically including a parodos (entry song) and a number of long choral odes accompanied by the aulos (the double-reed pipe). Within the competitive context of the Great Dionysia, a given chorus would perform three

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tragedies back-to-back, immediately followed by a satyr play (a raucous, riotous parody of a mythic or heroic narrative), so the physical and mental demands placed upon this group were great. The choruses of tragedy also represented a direct link to chorality as it was felt and experienced in their wider community of Athens through religious ritual, education, military training, and civic celebrations. As Wiles comments, such choral practices ‘honoured the gods, they demarcated and drew together the component groups of the community such as unmarried girls or warriors, and they had an educational function in physical training’ as well as in ‘transmitting the traditions of the community’ (2000, 131). In these various contexts, to perform well and in a virtuosic manner in the chorus publicly demonstrated virtue in a citizen (Kowalzig).5 This cultural multifunctionality found its echo in the city’s plays, where choruses might, from moment to moment, be required to help clarify narratives and focus attention (Easterling 1997a, 161), embody the political values and anxieties of a democratic polity (Goldhill, 47), or act as lightly fictionalized surrogates for tragedy’s real, festival audiences (Budelmann, 81–3). Wiles (2000, 141–7) distinguishes the multiple ways in which the performance of the tragic chorus may have been witnessed and perceived by the Athenians in the Theatre of Dionysus: as a representative character, as a political body, and as worshippers of the god Dionysus.

7.3   The Chorus as Character The chorus have defined social and cultural identities in each tragedy,6 often signifying a particular function and set of loyalties within the play’s imagined society or mythical world. As dramatis personae, this makes the chorus (in some respects) amenable to modern, realist interpretation. What do ‘elders’ or ‘enslaved women’ sound like or look like in our own world? The contemporary actor may choose to observe the behaviour of these kinds of groups. The present-day director might think of the counselling ‘elders’ as modern civil servants or bureaucrats, or see the traumatized and displaced women of Troy as victims of current global conflicts, fleeing from war-torn or genocidal homes. However, the immediate default to such readings runs the risk of eclipsing the chorus’ metatheatrical and ritualistic significations, as when, for instance, they speak about long ago myths, or dance and sing in moments of intense experience. In Aeschylus’ plays, the character of the choruses stands out powerfully due to their active role and the significant percentage of text they perform

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(Storey and Allen, 122). Such choruses include the daughters of Danaus, who perform nearly half the lines of The Suppliant Women; or the Furies in Eumenides who play a vital part, as a protagonist-chorus, in actively seeking redress against matricidal Orestes (both discussed in Chap. 6). Other dramatically interactive groups include the elders in Persians, who discourse on political and religious matters with their leaders, and the chorus of the Agamemnon, former soldiers and would-be councillors with strongly partisan views about divisions within the city’s royal house. Such choruses engage in dialogically intense relationships, often displaying qualities of action and volition which contradict the widespread assumption that the chorus are passive bystanders endowed with an ideal perspective on the events they witness. In Sophocles’ plays, the chorus deliver fewer lines than in Aeschylus. This does not mean they are less involved in the unfolding drama; their meditative pronouncements and celebratory hymns, strategically orchestrated in the structure of their plays, draw attention powerfully to the themes being scrutinized in each retelling of myth. The kommos, a particularly impassioned exchange between protagonists and chorus ­ (described in Chap. 4), is finely developed in Sophocles’ plays, and represents a significant innovation in the interaction between the individual and ensemble. The chorus in Oedipus the King and Antigone represent the well-being of their city-state and weigh the actions of potentially dangerous individual characters. In Electra, the chorus of female slaves track, observe, and sometimes emotionally identify with the play’s troubled heroine, and her obsession with vengeance. In a later work by Sophocles, Philoctetes (409 BCE), the chorus of Greek sailors are more collusive; in line with the plans of wily Odysseus, they plan to snare and take back to Greece the pain-­racked master archer, Philoctetes. If there is one thing that Sophocles’ plays disprove, it is the notion that the chorus is an allknowing group. The choruses in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Oedipus at Colonus, or Philoctetes are all  prone to changeable moods, and may be misguided in their judgements and advice (perhaps representing some of the challenges associated with democratic self-governance). Euripides absorbed the new music that was evolving in the culture of the Athenian city-state, his plays characterized  by the increasing length and subtlety of individual actors’ lyrics, long songful monologue passages (monodies), and a relative decrease in the overall use of the chorus. Nonetheless, Euripides’ choruses, while less prominent than their

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Aeschylean and Sophoclean equivalents, remain intensely involved with protagonists and their actions—even in the most narratively outlandish of the playwright’s works. For example, in Helen, the loyal, grieving, and courageous group of women who support the play’s heroine—and, at last, are carelessly abandoned by her—present a poignant contrast with the drama’s heedless, aristocratic, divinely protected central couple. And the bereaved, enslaved choruses of Women of Troy (415 BCE) and Hecuba (c.425 BCE) have become canonical examples of Greek tragedy’s potential to give voice to the displaced and the powerless, arraigning the misdeeds of soldiers and statesmen on the field of battle, and afterwards.

7.4   The Political Chorus Connections between the ancient chorus and the political dynamics of an emerging city-state democracy have been much discussed by classical scholars. As this volume has already described (Introduction; Chap. 6), Athens’ tragic plays would often receive their initial performances as part of the festivities of the Great Dionysia, a public celebration which served not only as a collective recreation, but also as an opportunity for affirming the city’s democratic experiment.7 The Dionysia took place in the early spring, a moment when the sea would be calm enough to permit foreign politicians and dignitaries to make the journey to Athens. At one level, therefore, the closely synchronized, physically gruelling performances of tragedy’s choruses presented an embodied exemplar of the self-proclaimed virtues of the democratic city, showcasing the extreme self-discipline with which a play’s citizen actors were able to ‘subordinate self to the collective’ (Wiles 2000, 131). There may even have been some overlap between the choreographic practices of the tragic chorus and the rhythmic military drills undertaken by the city’s young warriors, potentially lending a belligerent edge to the chorus’ skilled synchronicity.8 The deliberative, democratic culture from which Athens’ plays emerged (see Hall 2010, 64–7) also informs some of the narrative functions of tragedy’s choruses, who are often tasked with providing advice to their plays’ embattled protagonists. For example, the choruses of elders in Oedipus the King and Antigone both attempt to provide counsel

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to their leaders, striving to modify the extreme emotional and political positions adopted by members of their ruling family, which ultimately threaten the balance (and thereby the survival) of the state. Such theatrical debates mirrored some of the distinctive political practices of the city, whose free citizen males were regularly to be seen and heard, collectively and individually, mixing political disputation and with rhetorical passion in designated precincts such as the Pnyx, the official meeting place of the city’s democratic Assembly, and the agora, the traditional site for public arbitration. However, neither in the theatre, nor in the city’s deliberative spaces,9 could the political judgement of the collective be considered infallible, or the outcomes of its public decision-making ‘ideal’.10 Tragedy’s choruses can be deceived or misled, the more conservative among them are often disregarded by the public figures they seek to advise, while in certain tragedies (including Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Euripides’ Hecuba), the chorus actually elect to play an active role in revenge killings. Furthermore, the ‘character’ roles assumed by the choruses of fifth-­ century tragedies, a dizzying range which encompasses superannuated citizen males, female prisoners of war and slaves, ‘barbarian’ refugees, oceanic nymphs, and vengeful supernatural monsters, helped to ensure that tragedy’s choruses were able to speak from and for the perspectives of various marginalized and excluded groups. In this respect, as Paul Cartledge remarks, the tragic stage was ‘even more democratic than the Assembly’ (17), which ruthlessly excluded women, slaves, foreign-born residents, and young males from active participation.11 This multiplicity of choral identities only added to tragedy’s cacophony of competing, contentious voices, and the genre’s sprit of agonistic confrontation. The dances of the chorus also may have contributed to this effect, with their characteristic choreographic pattern of strophe and antistrophe (‘turning’ and ‘turning again’) potentially lending itself to the physical representation of a perplexed political community, collectively struggling to find answers to intractable political and ethical questions (Harrop, 133). For the contemporary performer, then, the different political resonances of the ancient tragic chorus (whether interpreted as exemplars of democratic self-­ discipline, vocal political deliberators, representatives of marginalized or excluded groups, or physically embattled participants in agonistic confrontations) can offer a rich variety of provocations.

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7.5   The Dionysian Chorus Dionysus was the god of wine and of ecstasy, who also became the cultic god of ancient Greek theatre. Thus, the chorus’ singing and dancing (within the religious framework of the Dionysia) represented a ritual act of worship as well as a theatrical performance.12 Consider the entrance of the chorus (parodos) in Oedipus the King, where the chorus explicitly invoke Dionysus, begging him to restore their faith amid the miseries and horrors of the plague that afflicts their city. The same chorus later speak of themselves in terms which elide the ritual celebrant (or petitioner) and the dancer of tragedy: When such things are done, what man shall contrive To shield his soul from the shafts of the God? When such deeds are held in honor, Why should I honor the Gods in the dance? (trans. Grene, 37)

Do they speak (more probably, sing) as grief-stricken Thebans, doubting the efficacy of prayer in a city apparently abandoned by the gods, or as later performers, reflecting on the impious acts their play recapitulates? The resulting ambiguity is central to this complex, resonant moment. That the tragic chorus developed complex dramatic roles while maintaining a residually ritual function makes sense in a Dionysian framework because the god stands for transformation, and the overthrowing of dualities. It has since become customary to conceptualize the influence of Dionysus in opposition to that of Apollo, the Olympian god of music, poetry, and also of plague. This duality of forces was brought to the fore in modern thinking through the publication of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), wherein Apollo is taken to represent order and classical rationality, and Dionysus the chaotic and the irrational.13 The Apollo versus Dionysus trope to be found in many modern critical theories of tragedy can be traced back to Nietzsche’s dualistic framework. According to this view, the ‘Dionysian’ qualities of tragic performance are associated with the experience of being absorbed into the chorus, and perhaps even losing your sense of individuality, willingly becoming lost in a massed group of bodies and voices. The ecstatic chorus of Euripides’ Bacchae (405 BCE) provides the clearest example of overlaps between religious and theatrical choruses. Explicitly identifying themselves

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as followers of the new god, dressing in ritual fawnskins, and having abandoned their quotidian identities in pursuit of spiritual experience, this chorus sings and dances hymns of praise, exhorting others to follow their example, and bringing Dionysus’ rites into the theatre space which was also his religious sanctum.14 In summary, the tragic chorus in the fifth century BCE embodied a range of identities and functions. They could, at different moments, be mimetic (embodying recognizable characters), political (emblematic of the city body), and/or ritualistic (in their public worship of the god of theatre). The chorus is often understood as a problem for the contemporary actor since, in all its manifestations, it violates the standard expectations associated with modern theatre’s psychologically consistent character roles. Billings, Budelmann, and Macintosh (2013) spell out this fraught historical reception: In drama, choruses have been the exception rather than the norm after antiquity, and even writers drawn to choruses, like Voltaire and Schiller, found themselves wrestling with them […] choruses do not come naturally to modern Western theorists and practitioners. (3)

Margherita Laera encapsulates the ‘problem’ as both an affective and aesthetic one: ‘The chorus communicates a sense of artificiality and unlikelihood to contemporary audiences accustomed to the conventions of naturalistic representation’ (64). Moreover, in some places and cultures, the political problem of the chorus resonates uneasily with the ‘traditional singing and simultaneous movements’ associated with Europe’s ‘totalitarian past’ (64). However, the apparent excess of the ancient chorus, its music, song, and dance, its appeals to mythic and religious modes of interpretation, and its transformation of the individual actor into part of a massed presence, have all engaged and inspired theatre-makers worldwide, including influential practitioners in intercultural performance-making,15 prompting the creation of a diverse and provocative array of contemporary responses to the ancient art of tragedy. Choral performance also invites (and challenges) the contemporary actor to engage their full psychophysical skill set, with each participating individual shaping and co-creating the unique balance between text and musicality, ritual and modernity, psychology and presence, which constitutes the identity of each particular choral grouping. The second half of this chapter explores a few of the ways in which contemporary theatre practitioners have re-envisaged, and re-activated,

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the transformative potential of the chorus, before outlining a series of exercises which aim to support psychophysical approaches to chorus work. Throughout, the following series of key questions are explored. Key Questions: • What skills are needed to achieve an experience of chorality (in contemporary terms, a quality of ensemble-ness) within present-day training and performance? • How can the contemporary actor within a Greek chorus establish a productive balance and dialogue between individual (character-­ based) and group (ensemble) creativity? • How can each project or rehearsal process establish its own set of choral practices and aesthetics? How can these support the exploration of a particular tragic text? And how might they contribute to the ongoing reinterpretation and reception of ancient plays?

7.6   Acting Chorus: The Challenges in Context Textbooks  on Greek tragedy often end up reinforcing the presumption, predicated on the terms of Aristotle’s analysis, that the chorus is to be regarded as a consistent and believable character within a drama. On this basis, Graham Ley’s Acting Greek Tragedy (2014) offers choral actors ways to ‘transact’ actions in space, suggesting that the ‘chorus is there to be addressed by the characters’ (58). Thus, Oedipus, when addressing the chorus, can ‘think in terms of modern politicians’ and the chorus can behave as ‘public opinion’ personified (58). Similarly prompted by Aristotelian thinking, Robert Cohen, in Acting One/Acting Two, perceives both the chorus and Oedipus as wilful characters, in competition for applause and approbation; the chorus, as the citizenry, should feel free, according to Cohen, to ‘murmur sounds of encouragement’ (328–9). The contemporary actor, operating on comparable impulses, may relish the idea of portraying a citizen of a plague-ridden and desperate community. They may research the horrific reality of ancient and modern plagues. Having established the overarching objective to survive, they may plot actions on designated words or phrases: to implore the gods, to vanquish the enemy, or to stand their ground. But such individual, intellectual choices are difficult to sustain in relation to all the other creative intelligences within the chorus, all perhaps striving to remain truthful to their own

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Stanislavski-inspired objectives, and psychological imaginations. At some point, too, such approaches will inevitably find themselves in conflict with the rhythmic and somatic promptings of tragedy’s verse—the embedded musicality of the play (as explored in Chap. 4). If the individualist, analytic approaches of Stanislavski’s early teachings are likely to prove counter-productive, contemporary theatre-making offers alternative ways to explore chorus, principally through ensemble practices. In contemporary theatre, the term ‘ensemble’ has become emblematic of a collaborative, devised, non-hierarchical, and physically engaged style of theatre, which has successfully challenged the primacy of earlier star-centred, and text-based systems. John Britton, in his survey of ensemble practices, stages a valuable discussion around the problems of the term, concluding that it’s difficult to capture or articulate in any definitive sense what ‘ensemble’ means (4). Instead, it is better, he suggests, to focus on the notion of ‘ensemble-ness’, the processes and methods that each theatre group engages in to produce an inter-relational dynamic, and thus to generate performance work. Greek chorus, considered as a group of performers working collectively through song, speech, and movement, displays several points of convergence with present-day ensemble approaches.16 In contemporary practice, the work of director Katie Mitchell and movement director Struan Leslie (introduced at the start of this chapter) exemplifies how psychological realism and physical scores can be combined to create compellingly  individualized choral figures within an ensemble.17 The influence of Stanislavski’s psychophysical principle is clearly evident in the approaches adopted by Mitchell, and the heightened psychological realism of her Greek choruses. Mitchell’s training in Stanislavski-based approaches, via her experience of observing the work of Tadeusz Kantor and Lev Dodin, is applied to the chorus-actor, who is encouraged to create detailed and rigorous psychological profiles, backstories, and timelines for their character within the chorus. In Emma Cole’s account of Mitchell’s process of creating Women of Troy, she discusses how ‘Mitchell assisted her actors in realizing these psychological profiles by working with them to portray such states with an accurate biology of emotions’ (403).18 For instance, as Cole explains, she ‘utilized a number of rehearsal exercises to apply these innovative acting techniques to Women of Troy’ deploying ‘“slice of life” exercises’ and facilitating the application of ‘physical mannerisms discovered in these workshops to their characters’ (405). As individual choral actors recalled states of fear or anxiety, Mitchell observed common physiological reactions, degrees of

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inertness, and even body temperatures, before using these to develop behavioural schemas for both individuals within the group, and the chorus as a whole. Alongside this process, Leslie sought ‘specific somatic exercises in training the actor’, which would integrate the psycho-biographical  elements generated by Mitchell and her work with the chorus. Leslie recalls ‘building a connected, collective, and individual physicality’, what he calls a “wrap around, IMAX” [of] total spatial/sensory awareness training with a 360 degree body awareness at the core’ (2010, 415). For Leslie, the lynchpin in connecting psychological awareness (or emotions) and physical sensation (or feeling) is breath. The connectedness  ‘comes through  an awareness of individual and collective breath’ (416);  subsequently,  the notion of ensemble is developed when ‘the performers practise walking and balancing their own “bubble space” [of breathing] with that of others’ (416). The resulting work created a heightened psychological realism for the chorus of Women of Troy in the individual roles (displaced female partygoers, still clutching handbags, and comforting themselves with snatches of social dances) they had created. At the same time, the chorus as a whole represented a physiologically unified ensemble whose shared vocabulary of physical actions, in times of stress or anguish, synchronized around viscerally experienced waves of traumatized inertness or jitteriness.19 In their collaborations on Greek tragic plays, Mitchell and Leslie have generated a precisely calibrated synthesis of psychological exactitude and collective, choreographic expression, which highlights the ability of the contemporary, psychophysical performer to re-activate, and re-envision, the potentials of tragedy’s choruses via ground-breaking ensemble practices. The work of Włodzimierz Staniewski at the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices (Poland) also fully immerses tragic actors in ensemble-­ ness, although in this case, the encounter takes place through chorus work and a sense of musicality. Within this celebrated company, whose Greek-­ inspired output includes works responding to Elektra (2004), Iphigenia at Aulis (2007), and Iphigenia at Tauris (2011),20 the training of actors in choral practices (often formally inseparable from contemporary ensemble training) is steeped in musicality and enriched vocally and physically with cross-cultural ideas. Gardzienice training focuses on the dynamics of mutuality (Zarifi, 405–7) through which a sense of musicality (a physical and vocal connection to shared tones, rhythms, and lyrics) helps  the actor sustain  a visceral  relationship between self and ensemble. Collectively, Gardzienice actors respond to ‘sound-heights and lengths of the music with their arms,

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hands, and entire bodies’, while ‘audible and visible rhythmic breathing’ is ‘interwoven into the overall texture’ of an emerging performance draft (397). In an exercise focusing on ‘individuation’, an actor singing and moving as part of the collective is ‘exposed’, and in that moment may use their own movement or sound in a unique way, before returning to the mutuality of the chorus, having intensified this group’s shared awareness and interactivity (Staniewski & Hodge, 71). In Konstantinos Thomiadis’ apt phrase: ‘the Gardzienice performer’s body exists only in coexistence’ (251). As the terminology of ‘musicality’ implies, in Gardzienice practices, song or sound, often mutually shared in the rhythm of bodies and voices, replace the discursive and elocutionary text as the main site of (and prompt for) imaginary work. The basis of this work is the natural energies emanating from the performer’s body, and not the character-based naturalism of the psychologizing actor in role (Zarifi, 389). According to Thomaidis, ‘the materiality of gesture and singing’ which underpins Gardzienice actors’ training aims at ‘the implementation of a specific type of desire, the performer’s desire for interpersonal, “I-thou” physiovocal communication’ (255). Performers train to absorb principles of musicality on all levels of preparation, from rehearsal to performance, enjoying the sensations of rhythm initially through group running, but also through marathon levels of energized play, taking breath and choreography (often developed through imitation of vase paintings)21 as the basis for intense choral expressions. In this robust, gruelling, and exhilarating work, the balance between psychology and musicality is entirely unlike that developed by Mitchell and Leslie, but the principle of each chorus or ensemble establishing its own particular synthesis of music, song, choreography, storytelling, character, and psychology remains constant. Here too, contemporary understandings of the scope and potential of ancient tragic dramaturgy are being transformed by the combination of practices applied to the re-making of the chorus. Contemporary urban experience has also inspired its own versions of ancient choral practice. The Vienna-based director Claudia Bosse transforms non-actors into choruses by tapping into the everyday narratives that people perform in city spaces. In Bosse’s work, instigating prescribed actions, such as speaking or undertaking simple tasks, creates an interdependence among people, turning them into a ‘silent chorus’. When Bosse opened the Festival Theaterformen (2008) with her staging of The Persians, the tragic chorus consisted of 340 citizens of Braunschweig

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(Germany), who assembled on the stage of the National Theatre.22 Dressed in everyday street clothes, Bosse’s Aeschylean chorus was initially indistinguishable from their co-present, contemporary audience, with whom they shared a performance space, creating an immersive experience, which provoked in its spectator/participants an unfolding set of reactions which oscillated between anxiety, identification, incorporation, voyeurism, confrontation, or resistance (Fischer-Lichte, 342–5). The Greek-inspired urban chorus was encountered in a radically different guise when, in 2005, a chorus of 18 women, dressed identically in red headscarves, red stiletto shoes, black trench coats, and sunglasses suddenly emerged in London’s Trafalgar Square. They stood on buildings, in doorways, on public walkways, crossed the street, suddenly commandeering a limousine, appearing in a brass band, or hovering above in a helicopter. In such performances, the guerrilla-style infiltration of a public space eventuates in a theatrical event.23 The Red Ladies’ chorus are a dynamic and free-spirited, yet rigorously disciplined group of individuals who share a common repository of stories from the past and draw on a set of communal behaviours (such as knitting, lamenting, simply waiting, jumping giddily), and immersion in stylistically diffuse music, to generate the effects of their performance. The chorus, according to Suzy Willson (the director of Clod Ensemble who created Red Ladies) prompts watchers to take a step ‘back from the psychology of the individual and observe the behaviour of a group, seeing them like a herd of animals, a swarm of locusts, and army of ants, or a flock of geese’ (Willson & Eastman, 421). Drawing on Lecoq’s actor-training exercises, including those which involve ‘imitating the movements of nature and then transposing these to dramatic situations’ (423), The Red Ladies resist imposing their own psychological narratives upon performed acts, so that their interventions remain ‘open for the audience to interpret how they please’ (423). That said, the project’s emphasis on ‘the chorus as witness’, and Willson’s questioning of whether ‘the very acts of witnessing, watching, remembering, re-enacting, lamenting were powerful, ­creative, political acts in their own right’, does reveal a political quality to the work, radically foregrounding the experience of those who feel ‘impotent in the face of big business, government and the media’ (421). And sections of The Red Ladies’ performances in which ‘everyone takes on a repetitive movement reminiscent of a hysterical movement’, likened to ‘the private madness that many women experience on their own’ (422), indicate that making publicly present elements of women’s

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inner lives (a focus this project shares with Mitchell and Leslie’s meticulously psychophysical-­ized tragic choruses) may be one of the motivations underlying this re-centring of the chorus. Practically, what this vast range of processes, disciplines, and aesthetics evidences is that re-imagining the training procedures and performance dynamics of the ancient chorus inescapably leads to a re-imagining of tragedy itself (Billings, Budelmann & Macintosh, 4–11), with each different group of theatre-makers establishing their own, unique and distinctive, sense of how ancient dramaturgies can inhabit, and interact with, the contemporary world.

7.7   Acting Chorus: From the Studio In the previous chapter, the contemporary actor was invited to explore the different forms of space encoded in Greek tragic texts, and the range of ways in which their potentialities might be re-activated in today’s studio work and performance. Similarly, the provocations set out in this section offer different qualities of chorus experience to explore, suggesting tasks that respond in different ways to the central challenges presented by chorus work. Repeatedly, this work aims to foreground the skills needed to access a sense of ensemble-ness in chorus-based work, the need to achieve a creative balance between individual and collective explorations, and the ways in which the choices made by a group of collaborators contributes to the establishment of a uniquely calibrated set of choral practices and outcomes. The exercises outlined here (designed for use by five plus actors, though most can readily be adapted for smaller groups) focus on a progressive scheme of tasks which starts with an amorphous, seemingly unformed chorus, then develops through a collective sentient chorus, ultimately building towards the exploration of a speaking (political) body of performers, and the transformative qualities of choral sound and presence. However, it is hoped that each group will ultimately make their own choices about which aspects of this work best support and characterize their own emerging chorus, and will apply and develop the suggested exercises accordingly. Each exercise can be applied to any choral text you elect to work with, though the prompts given here will focus on the choral entry song (parodos) of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. This choral ode sets the scene for the drama which famously follows, vividly depicting the plague which afflicts the city of Thebes. Structurally, it invites its choral performers to journey,

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both physiologically and psychologically, from despair to a sense of hopefulness and revival. In the first pair of contrasting stanzas (strophe and antistrophe), the chorus calls on the power of Zeus, then on Athene (goddess of wisdom), Artemis (protectress of wild places, virginity, and childbirth), and Apollo (god of wisdom, prophecy, and the sun). In a kind of circular prayer, these gods are fervently beseeched to intervene and manifest themselves in the here-and-now. In the second pair of stanzas, the chorus graphically describes the symptoms of their distress, the catalogue of horrors catalysing the city’s elders into ritual action. In the third pair, the god Ares (god of war) is identified with the violent miseries afflicting Thebes, and the chorus implore Zeus to overpower him with his fire-­ bearing thunderbolt. The chorus, growing more fervent throughout the parodos, finally invoke Dionysus (believed to have been conceived in Thebes), formally reminding the play’s earliest watchers that the performance of the ode was taking place within the god’s own precinct. 1. Energizing Chorus As discussed in Chap. 6 (Acting Space), Jacques Lecoq was one of the key practitioners engaged in re-imaging choral practice in Europe during the twentieth century, and his work remains influential today. This exercise (in Fig. 7.1) is in turn derived from exercises developed by the UK-based company Complicité, founded on the pedagogy of the École Internationale de Théâtre.24 Lecoq’s system of dramatic tensions outlines, in seven incremental stages, the energy levels of the body and its correlative physical qualities. The emphasis on breath in this account draws on the same principles suggested in Chap. 4 (Acting Sound), which proposed that breath can function as the somatic lynchpin between physical and psychological work. As described in the matrix below, the energy of the actor, at Level 1, is practically catatonic or unresponsive, almost exclusively exhaling. Imagine a state between dreaming and waking up. In Level 2, the body acquires a sense of consciousness, yet there is a feeling of being led rather than leading, with no particular focus in the breath except that it feels more available to the actor than at Level 1. Level 3 transitions into a sense of efficiency and economy; breath is directional but with no superfluous or excess energy, and with the inhaled and exhaled breath being equal. Imagine attending to simple tasks, but not engaging emotionally or judgmentally. Level 4 signifies a state where the body is reactive, active, and alert. This is a playful level, almost animal-like in its curiosity. Levels 5 and

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7 levels of dramatic tension

Actions

Breath

01 ‘Catatonic’

Lack of any tension in the body; complete relaxation; great effort to move or speak.

Nearly complete EXHALATION.

02 ‘Laid back’ (“Californian”)

Easy, loose, indirect swing of body.

Some INHALATIONS but they vanish.

03 ‘Economic’

Efficient, straight lines, grids, even effort; nothing more and nothing less.

EXHALATION and INHALATION are even.

04 ‘Alert’

Intentional rhythmic actions; movement more delineated and shaped.

EXHALATION and INHALATION are uneven.

05 ‘Suspense or Melodrama’

Decision-making, complexity in actions, more space and energy taken up.

More INHALATION than EXHALATION.

06 ‘Passionate’

Hyper-extensions of decision-making, impulsive; sudden dynamics of openness and closeness; release and resistance.

INHALATION and EXHALATION are extreme.

07 ‘Tragic’

Nth degree of movement and action; body immersed in total diffusion/radiation of energy.

Nearly complete INHALATION.

Fig. 7.1  Seven levels of dramatic tension

6 encourage the actor to move into more naturalistic states, manifesting increasing degrees of psychological investment, from a kind of melodrama to heightened passion. Level 7 (the extreme opposite of 1) is exclusively inhaled energy, and an intense scale of drama. It’s the nth degree of existence. The objective of this rubric is to give an actor the tools to modulate between physical states while sensing different levels of energy (and breath) through lines of text. You should spend some time warming up the body and voice prior to beginning this exercise, which begins with lying on your back in preparation for Level 1. • Choose a line of choral verse from any tragedy you like, and practice saying this line of text at Level 1. Then, repeat the process at Level 2 and Level 3, making sure not to rush through the levels, and feeling a sense of control and ease in each level.

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• Due to the lack of energy Level 1 and 2, it’s likely that you will emit mainly nonsense or gibberish sounds and vowels, along with some accidentally formed words. This is what is expected. The whole point is to stop the mind formulating meaning, and to allow the voice and body, at these levels of energy, to merely expel the sound of text with the breath. • Now try this same process while standing or moving through space, allowing any physical actions that arise to follow naturally from your breath and speech (and remembering the quality of action and breath that correlates with each level). It will take some effort of course to stand and move at these levels, but try to explore an equivalent feeling to that you experienced while lying down. Take a moment to reflect on how breath is related to energy, and how energy (or the lack thereof) can generate sensations in the body. To the actor exploring the first choral ode of Oedipus the King, for example, such sensations (inertness, exhaustion) might offer a way into the feelings associated with sickness, sorrow, or despair. What do you notice happens as energy increasingly travels through your words, at these different levels? What happens to the way you feel the text (or imagine its meaning) when the levels in energy increase? Do you experience a surge in hopeful or expectant feelings? Here, for instance, the actor might begin to intuit the chorus of elders’ ultimate faith in the possibility of godly intervention. • To encourage mutuality in this work, you might also choose to explore this work in pairs. • Stand facing one another, maintaining eye contact, and exchanging lines of choral text, first at Level 1, then at Level 2, and finally, at Level 3. • You should also feel free to explore different levels in your pair, so that you and your partner are sometimes working with the same degree of energy, and sometimes at different levels. At times, you can close your eyes and try to sense your partner’s communication of energy. What does it feel like to share these sensations with another actor; to use breath and sound as a mode of communicating your internal states? With your eyes closed, do you become more sensitive and aware of your partner’s state of energy?

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• Next working as a whole group (all facing in one direction), attempt to vocalize a line or two in unison, at Level 1, then at Level 2, then at Level 3. • Do you observe any bodily movements or impulses that seem to arise from your breathing and speaking of the line (maybe a step, a twitch, a shrug, or a reach)? • Try to perform this movement at the same time as you speak the line(s), finding and highlighting a moment of shared energy and impulse. Once this process is completed, take some time to reflect as a group. Does everyone’s body experience and respond in the same way? What shared impulses, and what variations or range of responses, are beginning to characterize your chorus’ vocal and physical presence? Is it possible to maintain moments of individual response within a sense of the wider collective? Only when everyone feels comfortable working in these first three levels is it advisable to attempt the same process, exploring the higher levels. Which levels of energy does your group find most productive for breathing and speaking your chosen text? Is there consensus within the group? If not, does the range of responses elicited begin to give a sense of the parameters of your chorus’ energy and presence? 2. Sentient Chorus A sentient being feels or perceives stimuli in the environment and responds to these. Watching a sentient chorus in action is one of the most affective theatrical encounters, giving rise to moments when a chorus appears to come into consciousness. This exercise explores how a feeling of shared sentience can be actualized without resorting to pre-arranged choreographic or representative movements. It will be necessary to have a percussion instrument, such as a gong, little cymbal, or hand drum available. • At walking pace, your group should randomly travel through a rehearsal space, avoiding moving in circles, but attempting angles, short and long journeys, and even interrupted movements. Try also to move at different speeds (in terms of the previous exercise, either Level 3 or Level 4 would be appropriate). Your breathing should be relatively even, with an equal focus on inhaling and exhaling.

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• A designated leader holding a percussion instrument should, at a random point, strike the instrument, causing everyone to ‘pause-­frame’ a movement. As you ‘pause-frame’, continue to breathe, and make eye contact with another individual. Try to resist looking down. Only when the designated leader strikes the instrument again should you continue travelling. Repeat this process several times, trying to vary the duration between strikes so it doesn’t become predictable. • As you repeat this sequence of travel and ‘pause-frame’, try to enrich the pose you freeze into. You might choose to explore more detail in your physical presence by amplifying a breath, an impulse, or a gesture. • Repeat this process again, this time having agreed on a line of choral text that everyone will speak during the ‘pause-frame’ moment. As you work, try to listen to the individual tones, pitches, and timings that different performers bring to your unison (or perhaps not so unison) vocalization. As in the last exercise, your group may begin to sense that there are some shared physical and sonic reactions arising. Might this give you some ways of generating a collective chorus reaction to the text, which comes from embodied impulses rather than preconditioned movements or a psychological reading of the text? If there is variation or disunity within the group, how can this help to identify the range of responses your chorus may be able to incorporate? What dramatic potentials do these present in relation to your chosen play, and its choral characters/presences? 3. Sensing Chorus This exercise builds on the previous one, exploring the collective reaction to rhythmic sound, and animating group awareness of—and in relation to—space. Ideally, you should divide into three sub-groups, each with a designated leader carrying a different percussive instrument (the sounds of these three should be clearly distinct from one another). Before beginning, each sub-group should be given the chance to familiarize themselves with the sound of their leader’s instrument. • To start, everyone should disperse through the studio, rehearsal room, or performance space. Each individual closes their eyes, and anticipates the sound of their sub-group’s instrument.

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• Each group leader, meanwhile, has the task of gathering up their followers through their particular sound. They should travel through the space like a kind of pied piper, striking their instrument so as to gain the attention of their sub-group, and guiding them to congregate together in a single location. If you are a follower, you may try to make a tactile (touching) contact with the rest of your group, while remaining alert to the aural clues and signals of your group leader. This exercise may give rise to feelings of vulnerability or anxiety in certain participants, and for some, this first stage may be enough of a challenge. However, if your group is happy to progress, the exercise can also be developed as follows. • Once each leader has gathered their sub-group, they may carefully prompt their followers to begin moving together  through the space—still with their eyes closed—in response to the sound of their designated instrument. • Sub-group leaders may also experiment with the pace of movement, on the basis that an increase in the percussive pace signifies a gradual increase in the speed of travel, while a slowing of that pace signals less speed. • Your group may also choose to explore the sensory cues potentially offered by the volume of the leader’s sound; perhaps a soft percussive  sound may provoke light, silent steps, while a heavier sound might invite a more weighty mode of travel. • The three sub-group leaders should eventually diminish the regularity and volume of their beats to such a low level that groups are left isolated in space, and leaderless. When this happens, the actors in each group should gradually open their eyes. At this point, listen to the sound of your breath, and perhaps feel your pulse. What does your pulse feel like? How does your breath feel? How do they compare with others in the same sub-group? • Before letting go of the moment, try to stay connected to this pulse and breath. Reacting to this pulse-breath feeling, improvise, in a jazz-like way, a vocal (wordless) sound, as though you are creating a personal riff. Each riff in the group will have a particular rhythm and shape to it.  The important thing is that sound and physicality are combined. • Once you have produced your riff, try to share it with the others in your sub-group, and see if you can collectively formulate a distilled

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version of these, creating a collective riff for the group. Keep repeating and sharing your riff (moving physically as well), picking up rhythms and sounds from others, until a transformation within the group  starts to take place. Listen, observe, enjoy—don’t evaluate. There will be a collective sense (an ‘aha’ moment) when a signature group riff is formulated. • Each sub-group should then share their collective  sound  riff  with other sub-groups. Is it possible now to formulate a signature sound for the entire chorus? (It may not be. Don’t worry.) This exercise invites your group to explore how listening and sensing together can begin to generate a dynamic and physical sense of belonging in a chorus, so try to take some time afterwards to reflect on your shared experiences of this work. What kinds of sensory belonging have begun to be established? What common sounds and behaviours were discovered in this exercise? When sharing space with, listening to, and observing other sub-groups, how were they similar to and/or different from your own? And how might these discoveries be used to explore and interpret the text of your chosen tragedy? Is the chorus of your selected play always one, coherent and unified, or are there moments when fragmentation and disunity may come into creative play? 4. Materializing Chorus Many of Lecoq’s exercises are grounded in precise observational skills, and responses to natural phenomena, animals, or the movement of the human body. One such approach, based on an analysis of the dynamics of nature (Lecoq, 87–92) explores the ‘essential’ materiality of the four elements (water, fire, air and earth) and their physical qualities and dynamics; for instance, water is flowing and wave-like, a flame is combustible, air moves like the wind, earth compresses and stretches. This approach to creating performances sidesteps psychology, as Suzy Willson of Clod Ensemble explains: ‘If I am playing a scene where I am angry, I do not start psychologically; instead, I can simply take on the movement of fire’. Instead, it cultivates ‘movement dynamics’ capable of creating ‘rich and contrasting dramatic atmospheres’ (Eastman & Willson, 423). This exercise invites each individual actor within a choral group to work physically with text, combining words or phrases with the dynamic embodiment of water, fire, air, or earth. Before commencing this exercise, your group should decide on a short section of choral text from your chosen play (a stanza or two would be

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ideal). Everyone should memorize this passage, and then a single phrase of text should be allocated to each actor, so that everyone has a different line to work on. • To begin, the group needs to decide to work with a single object which represents one of the four elements. (This might be a cup of water, a balloon filled with air, a handful of dry clay.) Observe the ‘journey’ of this object’s elemental reactivity, how its natural dynamics transition from one state to another, and how these reactions have a beginning, middle, and end point. For instance, a match ignites, has a period of combustion, then loses energy and is extinguished. Water that is disturbed develops waves, and finally comes to rest. A scrunched-up plastic bag expands as though air radiates through all parts until the energy of the air seems to have completely diffused. A rock dropped from a hand falls, hits the ground, travels a little, and then appears suddenly inert. • Next comes the slightly tricky part. Once you have observed your object, try to animate the dynamics you’ve just observed through a part of the body, say an arm or leg. The point is not to mimic the dynamics but to imagine the sensation of it travelling in your body. At the same time, allow the breath to join in the animation of the sensation. When you exhale, try to let the exhaled breath shape your body’s responsive physical movement. This may feel uncomfortable or foolish at first, but persevere until this breathed sense of your object, and its elemental properties, feels more natural and connected. Remember that the aim is not to mimic what the object looks like, or to create a ‘readable’ piece of choreography. Everyone’s response will look different, and there is no ideal form to aspire to. Just try to embody the object through an imaginative identification supported by your breath, which in a sense, inspires your breath-physical movement. • Now, try to vocalize your memorized segment of text as part of this breath-physical movement. Don’t get hung up on the meaning of your line, but think of the sound of the text merely as a by-product of the movement you’re performing. Your only objective is for this movement and text to happen with breath, and to keep imagining the material’s actions. • Once you are familiar with this combined movement and vocalization, take it in turns to share and observe one another’s ‘movement-­ sound phrase’. This is a matter of simply showing, and not of teaching or deconstructing, allowing the group as a whole to get a broad sense of each gestural outline, and the scope of breath and energy involved in your particular ‘movement-sound phrase’.

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• What happens next is a kind of mirroring. Everyone should (approximately) learn the ‘movement-sound phrase’ of every other actor in the group. Once everyone has a general sense of all the phrases, the chorus should form a circle, or collectively face a mirror (if there is one in the studio) and perform the entire stanza, with each line accompanied by its equivalent, dynamically inspired, movement. The effect of this process can be mesmerizing as the chorus appears to have a visceral sense of everyone’s ‘movement-sound phrase’; an organizing principle (rooted in observation of the dynamics of the material world) within which individual movements, voices, and expressions continue to be  heard, seen, and witnessed. Even apparently unromantic objects can prompt intensely imagined and effective work. Willson, for example, reflects on ‘the nostalgia that a piece of elastic has for its former shape’ or ‘the scars and bruises that a piece of newspaper retain after it has been crumpled’ (Eastman & Willson, 423). You may also wish to experiment with several repetitions of this process, deliberately introducing material objects which either seem particularly appropriate, or incongruous, in terms of your chosen tragic text. 5. Speaking Chorus This exercise is inspired by the Vienna-based theatre-maker Claudia Bosse, whose immersive re-staging of The Persians, with its massed chorus of citizens emerging from and interacting with the ‘real’ inhabitants of the cities where the work was performed, was discussed earlier in the chapter. The aim here is to create a sense of the choral collective as an identifiable citizenry or, if you like, a political chorus. Before you begin work on this exercise, select a segment of choral text that the whole group knows by heart. You should then collectively divide your chosen choral text between two ‘voices’, labelled A and B. There is no right or wrong way of doing this, but the phrases you allocate to each should be approximately equal in length. For example, an extract from the Oedipus the King’s opening chorus (in which the chorus beg for Zeus’ aid) might be divided in this way: A: There is no clash of brazen shield but our fight is with the War God, B: a War God ringed within the cries of men, a savage God who burns us; A: grant that he turn in racing course backwards, out of our country’s bounds

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B: to the great palace of Amphitrite, or waves of the Thracian sea A: deny the stranger safe anchorage. B: Whatsoever escapes the night A: at last the light of day revisits; B: so smite the War God, Father Zeus, beneath your thunderbolt, A: for you are the Lord of the lightning, B: the lightning that carries fire. (trans. Grene, 10)

• Now divide your group in half, forming two lines that face each other, allowing ample conversational space (at least arm’s length) between you. Decide that one is Group A and the other Group B. • Recite the whole speech all together, with all of Group A speaking the lines allocated to A  (in unison), and Group B speaking those allocated to B. • Repeat the process, only now it’s up to each individual actor to decide which portions of their group’s allocated lines they choose to speak. You may select a whole line, a particular phrase, the whole text, or just a few, isolated words. You may choose those portions of the text you’re planning speak in advance, or wait to respond to the unpredictable moment-to-moment of the unfolding exercise. You may find that more than one person speaks at a time, giving rise to spontaneous solos, duets, or ensembles. This is fine. • You should repeat this process several times, allowing speakers to become more confident and playful in their choices. With each repetition, new combinations of voices may emerge in speaking the lines, and these patterns should be allowed to recur or disappear freely. As the text is spoken, try to make eye contact not only with your fellow speakers, but also with as many as possible of those who are listening. You should aim to achieve a shared sense that the spoken text is occurring in-the-moment, and is being communicated with increasing urgency and conviction. Eventually, the way the spoken text coalesces or fragments  may prompt  movement in  the group,  creating various collective or individualized actions in the space. What is here described as a political chorus engages with the dynamic interplay (and physical formation) of individual and group opinions within, and in response to, a given tragic text; it instantiates the sight and sound of a politicized group. Sometimes, individual actors of groups begin to feel a sense of connection with particular lines, stirring up a sense of volition, which then begins to shape the actor’s breath, physicality, and

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interpretation of the words spoken. This sense of meaning coming into being at the moment the text is spoken recalls some of the ideas articulated in Chap. 5 (Acting Myth) concerning the ways in which performers can deliberately explore a spirit of not knowing to renew their creative engagement with a given narrative. This kind of exercise can also successfully be combined with some of those introduced in Chap. 6 (especially the agonistic explorations of ‘Protagonist v. Chorus’ and ‘Miasma’). 6. Towards the Transformational Chorus The Dionysian chorus is characterized by its ability to transform places and people, dissolving boundaries and transforming the individual actor into a participant within a wider collective, with its own energies, rhythms, and passions. Here, Lecoq’s work on cultivating the trainee actor’s ‘universal poetic awareness’ (47) is used to begin to explore ways of understanding and responding to the material world, drawing on ‘our various experiences and sensations’, including ‘everything that we have seen, heard, touched, tasted’, from which ‘common heritage’ of sensory knowledge ‘will spring dynamic vigour and the desire to create’ (47). This exercise challenges the contemporary chorus-actor to explore the sensory and imaginative data they hold in common with others, and to cultivate this shared resource as the basis for collaborative theatre-making. • Three actors should stand in front of the rest of the chorus, giving themselves enough space to move freely and safely. They are asked to close their eyes. A selection of objects should be placed in front of the rest of the watching group. • The exercise begins when one of the group points at one object, and the rest of the watching group take it in turns to utter the name of its colour. (So, for instance, if a yellow scarf is pointed at, everyone takes it in turn to say ‘yellow’). If members of the group have different languages available to them, these can also be used, depending on what comes most easily in each instance. (So the scarf may also be jaune, gelb, or amarillo). • As these words are sounded, the three actors in front should dynamically react to the words being spoken. The objective here is not to illustrate or describe an image associated with the colour. Rather it is to respond to the imaginatively embodied sensations each colour evokes. Try to breathe with, and within, what might be termed ‘the sensation of the colour’.

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• When the watching group feels that a particular exploration is completed, they should select a differently coloured object, and begin the process again. Eventually, everyone in the group should have the opportunity to explore their own embodied, imaginative responses to the chosen stimuli. • After a while, try to incorporate particular colour-words associated with the tragic text you’re exploring, and (as a group) begin to observe which of these seem to invite certain shapes, breath patterns, or rhythms from responsive bodies. You may also wish to try combining these observed reactions with particular lines from the play to create prototype fragments of physical scores. The language of colour potentially provides the contemporary actor of Greek chorus with a shorthand for distinguishing the changing moods and atmospheres of a given text. When, for instance, a particular colour is associated with each stanza of a choral ode, specific moments of performance can become imbued with that shared sense. Just as a painter plays with colour to transform a represented landscape, so actors may attune their bodies and imaginations to a palette of colours, cuing transformative shifts in feeling and sensation as they vocalize and move through an extended choral text. From the spectator’s point of view, a chorus engaged in such work appears to be tapping into a kind of bodily poetics, evoking a sense of transformation from within. 7. Embodying Text This is an effective way of beginning to explore moments when the chorus need to imaginatively transform the space they occupy, or evoke unseen spaces. This will work best with vivid, visceral reports of action, like the intense speeches of the messenger of Aeschylus’ Persians, or the choral ode from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus in which a battle (raging just offstage) is anxiously imagined. • One performer reads aloud a passage of descriptive text from a tragedy. The rest of the group should listen actively to this text, paying particular attention to clues about place, landscape, sensory experience, and physical action, and allowing those details to shape their own bodily presence and responses.

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• This exercise can begin with very small physical responses; muscular contractions, hunches, or twitches. But over the course of a few repetitions, you should try to expand these into a more fully physicalized response to the text; perhaps a finger twitch becomes an extended arm, or a flicker of unease becomes a full-body sway, bend, or jerk. Participants don’t have to be doing exactly the same thing, but they should be alert to the range of kinaesthetic prompts coming from other group members, and ready to respond to these. It is important that this does not become a mind-induced exercise. Pay attention to what the breath is doing (or what it wants to do) as these physicalizations occur. • Eventually, your whole group of listeners should be moving, and transforming their shared space, in playful embodied reaction to the textual stimulus. Throughout, try to stay aware of the energy of your own, and other people’s, breath and how it moves through your motions. As Chap. 6 suggested, the chorus’ occupation of theatrical space may be transformative, using intense shared imagining to evoke unseen locations and acts, and to cultivate the kinds of spatial instability associated with their patron god, Dionysus. In this exercise, the text of a tragic play acts as stimulus, but you may discover that the collective imagining of your group exceeds the prompts given. How has the embodied landscape you imagined modified or extended that evoked textually? Which of the co-­created movements and actions generated through this exercise might you choose to revisit and develop in the course of your creative process? And what are you learning about the distinctive presence, and range of embodied instincts and actions, which lend definition to your unique choral group?

7.8   Acting Chorus: Epilogue As this chapter has demonstrated, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to the inherited ‘problem’ of the Greek tragic chorus. Instead, when approaching tragedy’s choral roles and groups, the contemporary actor needs to be prepared to work creatively across a spectrum of psychophysical processes, potentially encompassing both the creation of a meticulously detailed, individualized choral identity, and the collaborative creativity of embodied, ensemble practice. The apparent paradox is epitomized in the collaborative work of Katie Mitchell and Struan Leslie, whose combined approaches result in a distinctive form of heightened psychophysical chorus, both psychologically acute and choreographically mesmerizing. In

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Iphigenia at Aulis and Women of Troy, the director’s process of modernizing the ancient chorus involved actors in deeply thoughtful processes exploring violence, tragedy, and anxious states, while a shared cognitive understanding of how gut feelings precede the conceptualization of a reaction connected such insights to Leslie’s integrative work on choral movement. The resulting chorus represented a convergence of form and content, with viscerally intense physical scores granting fleeting access to the experiences and emotional states of individual characters within the chorus, while providing a shared choreographic vocabulary through which to examine the women’s collective grief and trauma. However, the successful blend of psychological detail and eloquent movement distilled by Mitchell and Leslie is just one example of the way in which contemporary theatre-makers are synthesizing and hybridizing existing creative practices to grapple with the manifold provocations and potentialities of the tragic chorus. In the long-term, intensive work of Staniewski and the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices, the psychophysical balance is tipped towards the invigorating somatic dyad of musicality and mutuality, with the promptings of movement, sound, breath, and ensemble driving forward an exploratory process which produces breathtaking responses to ancient theatre practices and myths. Meanwhile, in The Red Ladies of Clod Ensemble, text and individual character psychology are almost entirely submerged in a contemporary reimaging of choral performance which radically re-centres the figure of the marginalized witness, and her potentially subversive socio-political potential, rendered thrillingly present through their massed traversal (and subtle transformations) of public space. As these examples demonstrate, these chorus’ relative proportions of mimesis and of embodied play are perpetually being re-negotiated, in fluid response to the convictions and aspirations of each unique performance group, and project. In each instance, different answers are being worked out to the two pivotal questions this chapter has identified: how will the individuality of the contemporary actor be positioned, and potentially transformed, in relation to the ensemble-ness of the choral group; and what precise combinations of participants, practices, objectives, and aesthetics will determine the unique character of each contemporary chorus? When dealing with a dramaturgical phenomenon so crucial to classical Athens’ celebrated theatre practice, and yet (thanks to the losses of history and transmission) so completely inaccessible in its practical aspect, the choices made by today’s actors and theatre-makers have the potential both

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to challenge clichéd expectations, and to radically revise current understandings of the possibilities of tragic chorality. This chapter, like the rest of this book, offers a series of invitations to engage creatively in a shared project of collaborative re-imagining.

Notes 1. For an overview of productions of Greek tragedy at the National Theatre (UK), see https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/ wRnC0fJ0 (viewed 10 February 2018). 2. See Dunbar (2013) on connections between ancient choruses and musical theatre. 3. See further http://www.yfarber.com/molora/ (viewed 1 February 2018). 4. On pre-theatrical choruses’ pragmatic, religious, and social roles, see Calame (125–53). 5. The cultural value placed upon chorality was such that even the vehemently anti-theatrical Plato advocated (non-dramatic) choral practices as a route to individual and collective wellbeing. See Plato’s Laws (II.350, 654b, 665a, 672e). Goldhill vigorously renders one of the ancient philosopher’s comments on the subject as ‘no chorus, no culture!’ (48). 6. The rise of the individual, professional actor in Hellenistic theatre (see Chap. 2) provides important context for Aristotle’s injunction—as well as Horace’s in Ars Poetica (Billings, 133)—that the chorus should be viewed as another actor in the plot. 7. For a fuller account of interactions between tragedy and democracy, see Cartledge (1997). 8. This militarist flavour may have been enhanced, as the fifth century progressed, by the custom of displaying tribute from Athens’ subject states prior to dramatic performances. During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), young men whose fathers had died in battle would also be presented with full military kit, provided at the city’s expense, at the same moment (Hall, 24). 9. See, for example, Hall (2010, 67–8). 10. It was the German philosopher, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), influenced by his brother Friedrich’s preoccupation with transcendental idealism, who identified the chorus as an ‘ideal spectator’ (1894, 78). In nineteenth-German theatre aesthetics, the chorus became a reflective and lofty presence who served as an intermediary on an audience’s behalf—an interpretation which continues to influence modern notions of the chorus.  11. See further Harrop (132). 12. On ritual aspects of choral dance, see Henrichs (1995) and Easterling (1997b).

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13. See further Fischer-Lichte (2013, 78–9). 14. Seaford (2006) offers an extended scholarly discourse on interpretations of Dionysian mythology and religious practice in ancient theatre. 15. While the convergence of intercultural performance practices towards the creation of chorus is impossible to discuss at any length within this chapter, some milestone examples may be suggestive. Parallels between Japanese Noh Theatre and Greek tragedy were made clear in Tadashi Suzuki’s Kabuki- and Noh-style re-imaginings in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in Yukio Ninagawa’s all-male staging of Medea (1984). In the early 1990s, Ariane Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil’s epic inter-cultural experiment with Indian Kathakali theatre and forms of Japanese theatre was used to powerful effect in Les Atrides. Mnouchkine’s work challenges political hegemony; the chorus actors immerse themselves in cross-cultural work to destabilize the cultural dominance of any one approach. Similarly, though with a core purpose of placing dance and song at the centre of the Greek tragedy, Thiasos Theatre has successfully blended Balinese Topeng dance and mask work. 16. However, the likeness is not complete. As Helen Eastman explains, a chorus is ‘a group on stage working as one unit, bound by either shared movement, voice, characterization, or text, where they represent not individual characters but a group’ (2013, 367), while ensemble actors do not necessarily (or solely) inhabit group identities in performance. 17. This chapter’s focus on Mitchell and Leslie as creative collaborators runs counter to a scholarly tendency to treat Mitchell (in her controlling role as auteur director) as the dominant force in shaping these productions. See, for example, Cole (2015) and Haydon (2017). 18. For both Leslie and Mitchell, the physicalization of the actor’s character, based on prompting instinctive feelings, draws on readings of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. 19. The National Theatre (UK) production of Antigone (directed by Polly Findlay in 2012) comparably reimagined the play’s chorus as a core (all male) staff of government functionaries and employees bunkered down in their command control office. Each chorus member had a clear individual identity, and status, in relation to this re-contextualized setting, but also participated in moments of stylized choreographic movement. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLkooLxsO4 (viewed 16 April 2018). 20. See further http://gardzienice.org/en/home.html (viewed 16 April 2018). 21. In Gardzienice’s responses to Greek plays, an ecstatic dance language based on ancient cheironomia (the formal communicative gestures said to be depicted in vase paintings) is often utilized. For an extended discussion of this aspect of the work, see Zarifi (389–96).

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22. Compare Laera’s account of Rimini Protokoll’s 2010 Prometheus in Athens, which similarly places real citizens, and their responses to divisive issues, centre-stage (265–76). 23. For a fuller discussion of site-specific aspects of The Red Ladies’ work, see Willson and Eastman (424–7). 24. Complicité publishes teaching materials which cover this topic. See http:// www.complicite.org/media/1439372000Complicite_Teachers_pack.pdf (viewed 10 February 2018).

References Billings, J., Budelmann, F. & Macintosh, F. (eds). 2013, Choruses, Ancient & Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Britton, J. 2013, Encountering Ensemble, Bloomsbury, London. Budelmann, F. 2013, ‘Greek Festival Choruses in and out of Context’, in J. Billings, F. Budelmann & F. Macintosh (eds), Choruses, Ancient & Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 81–98. Calame, C. 1999, ‘Performative Aspects of the Choral Voice in Greek Tragedy: Civic Identity in Performance’, (trans.) Robin Osborne, in S.  Goldhill & R. Osborne (eds), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 125–53. Cartledge, P. 1997, ‘“Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life’, in P.E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3–35. Cohen, R. 2008, Acting One/Acting Two, McGraw-Hill, Boston. Cole, E. 2015, ‘The Method Behind the Madness: Katie Mitchell, Stanislavski, and the Classics’, Classical Receptions Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 400–21. Dunbar, Z. 2010, ‘Dionysian Reflections upon A Chorus Line’, Studies in Musical Theatre, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 155–69. Dunbar, Z. 2013, ‘How Do You Solve a Problem like the Chorus?’ Hammerstein’s Allegro and the Reception of the Greek Chorus on Broadway’, in J. Billings, F.  Budelmann & F.  Macintosh (eds), Choruses, Ancient & Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 243–58. Easterling, P.E. 1997a, ‘Form and Performance’, in P.E.  Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 151–77. Easterling, P.E. 1997b, ‘A Show for Dionysus’, in P.E.  Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 36–53. Eastman, H. 2013, ‘Chorus in Contemporary British Theatre’, in J.  Billings, F.  Budelmann & F.  Macintosh (eds), Choruses, Ancient & Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 363–76.

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Fischer-Lichte, E. 2013, ‘Classical Theatre’, in D. Wiles & C. Dymkowski (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 73–84. Fischer-Lichte, E. 2017, Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedy and Cultural Identity in Germany Since 1800, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Goldhill, S. 2007, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, Chicago University Press, Chicago. Grene, D. (trans.). 1994, Sophocles: The Theban Plays, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Hall, E. 2010, Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hall, P. 2000, Exposed by the Mask, Oberon Books, London. Harrop, S. 2018, ‘Athens: A Work-in-Progress’, Kritika Kultura, vol. 30, pp. 129–37. Haydon, A. 2017, ‘British Auteurship and the Greeks: Katie Mitchell’, in G. Rodosthenous (ed.), Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 73–92. Henrichs, A. 1995 ‘“Why Should I Dance?”: Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy’, Arion, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 56–111. Kowalzig, B. 2004, ‘Changing Choral Worlds: Song-Dance and Society in Athens and Beyond’, in P. Murray & P. Wilson (eds), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousikê in the Classical Athenian City, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 39–66. Laera, M. 2013, Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Peter Lang, Bern. Lecoq, J.  2002 [2000], The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, Methuen, London. Leslie, S. 2010, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk: Modern Moves and the Ancient Chorus’, in F. Macintosh (ed.), The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 410–19. Ley, G. 2014, Acting Greek Tragedy, University of Exeter Press, Exeter. Schlegel, A. 1894, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, George Bell & Sons, London. Seaford, R. 2006, Dionysos, Routledge, London and New York. Shevtsova, M. 2004, Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance, Routledge, London. Solga, K. 2008, ‘Body Doubles, Babel’s Voices: Katie Mitchell’s Iphigenia at Aulis and the Theatre of Sacrifice’, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 146–60. Staniewski, W. & Hodge, A. 2003, Hidden Territories: The Theatre of Gardzienice, Routledge, London. Thomaidis, K. 2014, ‘Singing from Stones: Physiovocality and Gardzienice’s Theater of Musicality’, in D.  Symonds & M.  Taylor (eds), Gestures of Music

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Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 242–58. Wiles, D. 1997, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2000, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2007, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Willson, S. & Eastman, H. 2010, ‘Red Ladies: Who are They and What Do They Want?’, in F. Macintosh (ed.), The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 420–30. Zarifi, Y. 2010, ‘Staniewski’s Secret Alphabet of Gestures: Dance, Body, and Metaphysics’, in F. Macintosh (ed.), The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 389–410.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusions

As we reach the final pages of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, you might be feeling a little shaken and stirred. The book has repeatedly challenged you to let go of inherited or unexamined assumptions, exchanging these for a new set of possibilities—acting Greek tragedy in terms of sound, myth, space, and chorus. These are the elements of the form most likely to be perceived as challenging by contemporary actors, though the discussions that have developed around these themes have often ended by proposing that such encounters might not actually be so daunting when considered in relation to the kinds of skills and practices (embodied breath, storytelling, scenography, ensemble) which may already feature in the present-day performer’s toolkit. In fact, as this volume has proposed, the contemporary actor’s intellectual preconceptions and cultural anxieties are much more likely to block effective imaginative engagement with the texts, narratives, character roles, and choruses of Greek tragedy than any lack of practical acting technique. Chapter 2 (The  Aristotle Legacy) highlighted the way in which Aristotelian perspectives can limit the contemporary actor’s ability to engage with the challenges and opportunities presented by ancient tragic plays, particularly through their reification of textual authority, their focus on tragedy’s exceptional protagonists, and their emphasis on systematized ‘rules’. Chapter 3 (The Stanislavski Legacy) developed this argument, exploring how such approaches can predispose the contemporary actor to couple Aristotelian analysis with acting techniques drawing on Stanislavski’s © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_8

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early pedagogic experiments, rather than applying insights and practices deriving from his ongoing, psychophysical explorations (or subsequent integrative training systems) to the multiple challenges of acting tragedy. The four practice-informed chapters that followed offered a series of re-encounters with tragedy based on alternative presuppositions, foregrounding the importance of musicality, storytelling, space, and chorus to tragic performance, and exploring a cross-section of ways in which contemporary artists and theatre-makers have responded to these stimuli across a range of settings and contexts. Each chapter’s exercises have aimed to promote active, embodied, and playful engagement with these different aspects of tragic performance, while also identifying points of potential contact between the task of the ancient actor and the ongoing training, and multi-faceted skill set, of the contemporary actor. Throughout, a series of unresolved tensions—between text and musicality, character roles and theatrical storytelling, mimetic or transformative spatial presence, individualized character-building and choral ‘ensemble-ness’—have been articulated, manifesting themselves not as rigid binaries (‘either/or’) but as sliding scales, or continuums. In consequence, the task of the contemporary actor and/or theatre-maker has been conceptualized as one of active, informed self-positioning in relation to each of these choices, with the precise combination of practices selected each time, and the relative emphasis placed upon different aspects of ancient dramaturgy, critically characterizing each modern artist’s individual creative response to the multi-layered provocation of Greek tragedy.1 As stated at the outset, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor does not attempt to identify a singular, ‘correct’ route by which these complexities may be navigated. Nor does it seek to approximate, with historical or archaeological accuracy, the lost art (or arts) of the ancient tragic actor. As the various case studies presented in this volume, as well as its authors’ own teaching and industry experience, attest each context and project calls for its own specific set of techniques, emphases, and innovations. Ideally, the examples and exercises presented here should serve as provocations, prompting further creative experiment, leading to localized fusions and adaptations of the approaches modelled in each chapter. However, some broader themes emerging from this project may also present the ­self-­reflective actor of tragedy with a set of ongoing considerations to contextualize and inform such practical explorations.

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8.1   Against ‘Classical’ Tragedy As the early portions of this volume argued, Aristotelian perspectives can be among the most significant obstacles to the contemporary actor’s effective engagement with Greek tragedy as a living theatre practice, leading many artists (and artists-in-training) to misidentify both the challenges and the opportunities presented by ancient tragic drama. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor aims to act as a prompt to more active, informed, and interrogative thinking on this subject. The contemporary performer needs to be aware of the aura of ‘truth’ with which such classical ‘rules’ have become invested, and alert to the limitations and distortions inherent in the uncritical assimilation of such views. By contrast, acknowledging the cultural and historical contexts in which such putative first principles were articulated is to divest these rules of their talismanic powers, making possible a more balanced understanding of how they might precondition responses to a historical art form, and how alternative approaches may be required to release the actor to respond with spontaneous, playful openness to the surviving performance scores of ancient plays. To destabilize the contemporary actor’s sense of their Aristotelian inheritance is also to throw light upon important issues of translation and textual authority. This volume’s attitude towards the texts of tragedy, their status and potentials, ultimately resolves itself in another creative tension. The text of a tragedy does not provide the contemporary actor with everything they need to know to re-activate ancient plays in present-day contexts, nor should the precariously transmitted notations of an ancient playwright (or their later scribes) be taken as limiting the multi-modal creativity of today’s theatre artists. Yet, the surviving texts of tragedy do provide key evidence for the kinds of theatre practices familiar to tragedy’s earliest performers, and may play a vital role in prompting new explorations of ancient tropes and themes. Here, too, each contemporary performer (or group of co-creators) must consciously decide where they place themselves and their work in relation to a conceptual continuum, which will determine the status of dramatic text in relation to other components of tragic dramaturgy. Translation, likewise, is never a neutral act, and the passions, politics, and perspectives of tragedy’s contemporary translators/ adaptors have major implications for the ways in which they re-imagine or re-invent the poetic structures and performance modes associated with ancient dramas. Meanings and forms may be lost in translation; but other things may be found, or fresh encounters generated, through the process

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(Wiles 2000, 196). And despite the entrenched neoclassical clichés which frequently underpin negative theatre reviews,2 the unfixed-ness of tragedy’s narratives, and the multiple revisions of archaic myths encountered within the tragic canon, invite the present-day interpreter of ancient drama to reinvent the stories of surviving tragedies in the same innovative spirit in which the plays were first created. Such a view finds its contemporary correlative in formulations which re-conceptualize the actor as ‘theatre-maker’. In Theatre-Making (2013), Radosavljević traces a recent history of the English-speaking actor from a predominant concern with the ‘verbal content’ of plays (strongly informed by Shakespearean heritages) to ‘new approaches to text and performance often driven by the ensemble way of working’, or by a European emphasis on ‘the spirit rather than the word of the text’ (193). In this analysis, the singular authority of the playwright is increasingly subsumed into less hierarchical models of collaborative creativity, with actors ‘once again, recognized as having the potential to act as authors in the medium of theatre’ (2015).3 If the Lycurgan reforms of fourth-century Athens created the authoritative figure of the ‘classical’ playwright, whose written texts were to be preserved from tampering by self-serving dramatic interpreters, such present-day discourses empower the contemporary actor to imaginatively excavate the creative practices by which the ancient city’s tragedies reached their first performances—and, in so doing, to begin to rediscover their own authority in relation to ‘classical’ narratives and dramaturgies.

8.2   The Psychophysical Actor This revised sense of the potential role of the performer also speaks to this volume’s reconsideration of the acting practices through which the contemporary theatre artist approaches tragedy. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor has highlighted how popular receptions of Stanislavski’s actor-training process, often distortedly focused on the early (analytic, psychologizing) stages of his emerging system, can predispose the actor to mental problem-solving, privileging the intellectual pursuit of a ‘score’ of logical actions which, when activated during performance, aims to generate a truthful sense of an individual character’s lived experience. It is this logical progression of a character’s desires and acts, assumed to be the result of authorial intention, which ‘gives credibility to the sequence, and so allows it to be believable in terms of the possibility of it taking place’ (Zarilli, Daboo & Loukes, 169). However, as has been

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demonstrated, Greek tragedy, a hybrid theatrical form emerging from the convergence of religious ritual, epic story-making, and choral music and dance, often does not provide the kinds of plots, or logical character arcs, such an analysis presupposes. Its multi-modal form instead calls for the kinds of integrated acting practice located in Stanislavski’s long-term psychophysical explorations, and developed by successive actor-training practitioners. As has been outlined, psychophysical acting infers a natural integration or convergence of two sets of interrelated activities, with intellectual inquiries being activated through embodied processes, and bodily knowledges stimulating reflective or propositional thought. Yet, in all psychophysical processes, there is a hierarchy of activities or procedures that conditionally emerges and determines to what degree and intensity embodied and/or psychological cogitations occur, how they occur, when they are remembered to occur, and the relative impact or presence of each in relation to ultimate performance outcomes. Psychophysical acting potentially draws on a range of intellectual, emotional, and physical skills and disciplines, and negotiating between these, moment-bymoment, may give rise to sensations of imbalance or struggle, rather than the harmonic aspirations which are evoked and idealized within Stanislavski’s system.4 For the ­contemporary actor encountering Greek tragedy through psychophysical experiment, the results may include moments of what may be termed ‘kinaesthetic dissonance’.5 On the other hand, such a state of embodied dissonance, or disturbed feeling/ knowing, may also contribute to the cultivation of a deep and somatic sense of tragedy’s vocal scores, situations, and characters. Greek tragedy potentially invites the fractured, the angular, the non-linear; its dramaturgy calling for an unresolved dialogue or interplay between speech and sound, theatrical space and dramatic scene, individual choices and choral gestures. In the context of this work, embodied, kinaesthetic dissonance may provide a fertile ground for exploring tragedy’s formal tensions and contradictions.6

8.3   Tragedy and History This quality of dissonance may also be applied to contemporary understandings of theatre history, and Greek tragedy’s place within such discourses. Erika Fischer-Lichte outlines how tragedy has often been taken as an originary site for European theatre practices:

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It is the traditionally held view that the history of all European theatre begins with ancient Greek theatre, which is regarded as the first and thus original form of theatre in Europe from which later forms evolved. This notion is underpinned by a linear concept of history, which implies that any phenomenon in history can be directly traced back to its ‘roots’ […] (73)

However, such ‘linear, even universalist’ (73) accounts risk making the cultural value presently attached to Greek tragedy seem inevitable, the logical outcome of a stable, orderly process, whereas the reception of the ancient art form has been (like the plot of a fifth-century tragedy) vastly more complex than this.7 Different plays and playwrights have been valued differently at successive moments, and different aspects of ancient dramaturgy have been foregrounded (or quietly disregarded) in response to the changing contexts of tragedy’s re-performance, while unexpected conjunctions have created moments of resonance or alignment between apparently unlike theatre cultures. A similar complexity characterizes the written and archaeological evidence upon which historians depend for their (always provisional) understanding of tragedy in its earliest manifestations. Manuscripts have been lost, melodies forgotten, spaces re-mapped. As Fischer-Lichte explains, ‘no historiography of ancient theatre will be able to tell us accurately what kind of theatre it was’: Rather, each time, scholars and theatre practitioners will invent it anew by re-grouping and re-interpreting the known as well as the disputed facts in light of their own interests. As regards practitioners, they will select only those ‘facts’ that seemingly legitimise their own claim to a theatre of the future—aligning themselves with or contesting a model of antiquity. Theirs will be an act of creative appropriation based on whatever limited set of assumptions about ancient theatre prevails at the time. This appropriation will always be partial—at once incomplete and prejudiced. (74)

The present project does not pretend to stand aloof from this history of appropriation and re-appropriation, although it does propose that by explicitly engaging with the surviving evidence of tragedy’s earliest appearances the contemporary actor may gain a clearer appreciation of their own potential agency in relation to the form’s (always emergent and contestable) range of meanings and values.8 If, instead of viewing tragedy as a unified, logical whole, transmitted directly from antiquity, the contemporary actor is able to conceptualize the genre’s surviving fragments as

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partial, perhaps contradictory, and always in need of active interpretation (73–4), then their own creative re-imagining may be perceived as a crucial component of the task of re-activating tragic plays today.9 Cultural politics may  accompany  this realization, too. As Margherita Laera argues in Reaching Athens (2013), the ‘myth of “origin”’ with which modern western powers like to invest Athens’ ancient theatre culture reflects ‘national and transnational communities in search of identities’,10 seeking ‘self-definition’ and global ‘affirmation’ through the appropriation of an art form widely assumed to be exemplary in its aesthetic, philosophical, and democratic credentials (43).11 The ‘narcissistic model’ (44) of classical reception articulated and critiqued by Laera presents the contemporary theatre-maker with another series of continuums upon which creative responses to ancient tragedy need to be positioned; should contemporary re-performances of ancient plays aim to achieve effects of cultural recognition or strangeness (44),12 a consensual mood of community-building or the politicized frictions of theatrical agonism (Harrop 2018)? If the actor of Greek tragedy is also the author of their own performances, then a critical sense of how their artistic endeavours relate to wider historical, cultural, and political discourses becomes an important facet of their creative practice. The actor of tragedy once again must become an engaged democratic citizen,13 with the authority and responsibility to engage in the key debates and struggles of their own time and place.

8.4   The Contemporary Actor and Greek Tragedy The professional contexts in which the actor of tragedy might expect to operate are changing rapidly. International conferences and workshops on actor training in the twenty-first century have ambulated around new themes regarding learning environments (including digital resources, or global networking), technological advancements and interfaces in training (such as motion capture), gender and disability, and virtual simulations which sample and re-process performances, editing human actors and their work into ideal versions. Within this transforming landscape, the contemporary actor becomes an artist who crosses boundaries and combines multiples approaches within their evolving practice, exploring new syntheses of formerly discrete processes and categories. Choosing their creative path(s) through this uncharted territory, they must weigh in the balance the values of a sustained, focused, and systematic training in a single,

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specialist methodology, and the need to build a flexible ‘toolkit’ of acting and theatre-making skills, which can be applied to a wide range of roles and contexts. Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor has suggested that ancient plays are exciting for actors to work on precisely because they call into play a wide range of individual and collaborative skills, in varying (and sometimes unpredictable) combinations. Greek tragedy, as conceptualized in this volume, may therefore provoke the present-­day theatre artist to critically reflect upon their own balance of practices, offering unique opportunities to build conceptual links back to (and forward from) their ancient, multi-disciplinary counterparts. In one sense, the most important outcome of the contemporary actor’s engagement with ancient drama may be a reinvigorated sense of the potential range and scope of their own artistry. In the process of exploring and re-performing ancient tragic plays, bold choices must always be made. The simultaneous demands of tragedy’s soundscapes, storytelling, spatial poetry, and choral experience require that the present-day actor must select or prioritize, choosing to focus on some facets of the genre at the expense of others. No single performance event, no one realization of a particular set of dramaturgical variables, can hope to respond fully to the multifarious provocations the long history of Greek tragedy presents. But for the contemporary actor or theatre-maker, any combination of the co-ordinates charted in this book may mark the beginning of a rich creative journey, in the course of which many different actualizations of tragic narratives, texts, and practices will be activated and explored. The aim is not to re-enact a transient moment of theatre history, but to transform ancient performance practices into unexpected new forms, capable of engaging with the needs, fears, and aspirations of our own contemporary cultures. And so, for today’s actors of tragedy, just as for the plays’ first creators, everything remains to be discovered.

Notes 1. Compare Evans (xxvii) and Pitches (64). 2. Such critical statements often operate on the—broadly Aristotelian— assumption that the task of re-performed tragedy may be encapsulated in a simple, self-evident dyad; to be ‘faithful’ to an ancient playwright’s (notional) intention, and morally uplifting for a present-day audience. See, for example, Woodhead (2015).

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3. As a point of comparison, Rodosthenous (2017) invests this authority in the figure of the director as ‘auteur’ (4–8). 4. In My Life in Art, Stanislavski proposes: ‘Being creative is above all the total concentration of the whole mind and body. It includes not only the eye and the ear but all our five senses. Besides the body and thoughts, it includes intelligence, will, feeling, memory, and imagination. During creative work our entire spiritual and physical nature must be focused on what is happening in the character’s soul’ (Benedetti, 258). However, within such aspirations, there is also a danger of venerating integrated-ness or holism as an end in itself, in much the same way distorted value judgements idealize yoga-fit bodies or correct attitudes in actor-training studios (Kapsali). 5. The concept of dissonance, derived from the notion of an unresolved psychological state, was proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger. Humans have an inner drive to resolve inconsistencies between what they believe or feel, and external agencies which challenge these cognitive settings (Cohen, 5). When in this state, humans experience ‘cognitive dissonance’. 6. Arguably, it is here that this volume’s thinking comes closest to postdramatic discourses, which foreground rupture and interruption as necessary to the creation of contemporary tragic experience (Lehmann, 441–4). 7. For a critical consideration of the ‘universalist’ claims made by some proponents of tragedy in relation to post-colonial and non-Western settings, see Fischer-Lichte (82–3). 8. Compare Wiles (4): ‘Theatre practitioners have repeatedly looked to the past, to old stories, old spatial arrangements, and old techniques, in order to challenge and renew present practices. Historians thus have one role as servants to the art of contemporary theatre-making.’ 9. Similarly, if instead of accepting historically skewed receptions of Stanislavski’s system as a primarily psychological method, or idealistically holistic experience, the contemporary actor is empowered to apply aspects of Stanisalvski’s actor training as part of, and within, a more flexible acting ‘toolkit’, a more active and open-ended approach to the unique challenges of performing Greek tragedy may become possible. 10. Laera particularly focuses her critique on European countries, but similar claims may be extended to other developed, English-speaking nations. For a brief history of the modern desire to create community through performances of tragedy, see Fischer-Lichte (80–1). 11. Though new right-wing appropriations of classical narratives and archetypes are beginning to contest such neoliberal claims to possession of the ‘classical’ past. See further McCoskey (2017); Zuckerberg (2017), while duBois (2001) analyses longer-term trends.

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12. Acting approaches inspired by Stanislavski’s early work often helps constitute the former, foregrounding modern psychology, interpersonal or domestic relations, and coherent character arcs; Cole identifies such practices as functioning ‘like a domesticating translation’ (1). The latter option was explored in Laera’s subsequent research project ‘Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: “Foreignisation” in Theatre Practice’ (2016–19). http://www.translatingtheatre.com/the-project/ (viewed 23 April 2018). 13. Though this does not, for the purposes of the present argument, imply the range of exclusions associated with this ‘citizen’ role in its classical Athenian context. See Hall (124–5) and Fischer-Lichte (80).

References Benedetti, J. (trans.). 2008, Konstantin Stanislavski: My Life in Art, Routledge, London. Cohen, R. 2013, Acting Power: The 21st Century Edition, Routledge, London. Cole, E. 2015, ‘The Method Behind the Madness: Katie Mitchell, Stanislavski, and the Classics’, Classical Receptions, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 400–21. duBois, P. 2001, Trojan Horses: Saving Classics from Conservatives, New  York University Press, New York. Evans, M. (ed.). 2015, The Actor Training Reader, Routledge, Abingdon. Fischer-Lichte, E. 2013, ‘Classical Theatre’, in D. Wiles & C. Dymkowski (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 73–84. Hall, E. 1997, ‘The Sociology of Greek Tragedy’, in P.E.  Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 93–126. Harrop, S. 2018, ‘Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 99–114. Kapsali, M. 2014, ‘Training in a Cold Climate’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 219–32. Laera, M. 2013, Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy, Peter Lang, Bern. Lehmann, H.T. 2016, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, Routledge, Abingdon. McCoskey, D.E. 2017, ‘What Would James Baldwin Do? Classics and the Dream of White Europe’, Eidolon, viewed 23 April 2018, https://eidolon.pub/whatwould-james-baldwin-do-a778947c04d5. Pitches, J. 2015, ‘Technique—Training the Actor’s Body and Voice’, in M. Evans (ed.), The Actor Training Reader, Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 55–65. Radosavljević, D. 2013, Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

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Radosavljević, D. 2015, ‘10 Traits of Theatre-Making in the 21st Century’, Exeunt Magazine, viewed 8 January 2018, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/ ten-traits-of-theatre-making-in-the-21st-century/. Rodosthenous, G. (ed.) 2017, Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, Bloomsbury, London. Wiles, D. 2000, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wiles, D. 2013, ‘Why Theatre History?’, in D. Wiles & C. Dymkowski (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3–6. Woodhead, C. 2015, ‘Antigone Review: Needless Tinkering Disturbs Sophocles’ Classic’, The Sydney Morning Herald, viewed 15 April 2018, https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/antigone-review-needless-tinkering-disturbs-sophocles-classic-20150826-gj7yxp.html. Zarrilli, P., Daboo, J. & Loukes, R. 2013, Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and Process, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Zuckerberg, D. 2017, ‘How to be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor’, Eidolon, viewed 23 April 2018, https://eidolon.pub/how-to-be-a-good-classicist-under-a-bad-emperor-6b848df6e54a.

Index1

A Actors Touring Company, 19, 149 Actor training, 2, 7, 8, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21n5, 22n17, 30, 43–46, 49n33, 53, 54, 63, 67, 68, 70–72, 73n2, 74n4, 98, 107, 108n2, 110n33, 127, 166, 167, 178, 222, 223, 225, 227n9 Adler, Stella, 59 Aeschylus, 1, 10–12, 23n18, 33, 35, 45, 49n29, 60, 65, 87, 88, 90, 92, 100, 103, 110n35, 117, 118, 121, 134, 144n14, 149, 155, 156, 158, 160, 163, 169, 170, 179n1, 180n14, 180n21, 187–189, 191, 211 Agamemnon, 1, 35, 49n35, 56, 87, 92, 109n23, 117, 118, 155–159, 180n21, 189 Eumenides, 100, 103, 157, 159–161, 189 Libation Bearers, 1, 117, 157, 191

Oresteia (trilogy), 11, 35, 48n18, 49n35, 145n14, 155, 159, 163, 187 Persians, 10, 118, 134, 169, 170, 174, 178, 189, 197, 208, 211 Prometheus Bound, 98, 103, 118 Seven Against Thebes, 110n35, 118, 134, 166 Suppliant Women, 19, 149, 150, 163, 167, 174, 176, 178, 189 Agathon, 22n10, 41, 42, 49n37 Agon, 162 Agonism, 225 Alexander Technique, 110n30 Alexander the Great, 33, 37 Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), 5, 6, 21n4 Aristophanes Frogs, 12, 47n4, 48n16 The Women at the Thesmophoria, 49n37

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4

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INDEX

Aristotelian critique/analysis, 9, 15, 16, 21n5, 44, 53, 61, 65, 73, 142, 219 Aristotle, 9, 16, 17, 22n7, 27–47, 47n2, 47n9, 48n19, 48n20, 48n21, 48n22, 49n35, 49n37, 49n38, 53, 63–67, 71, 74n13, 75n15, 82, 107, 126, 152, 177, 179n7, 194, 214n6 biography, 30, 32 Nicomachean Ethics, 74n13 Physics, 63 Poetics, 9, 16, 17, 27–36, 38, 40, 41, 43–46, 47n2, 47n3, 47n9, 48n20, 53, 63, 82, 107, 152, 179n7 Posterior Analytics, 63 Rhetoric, 36 Artaud, Antonin, 21n4, 54 Athenodorus, 37, 38 Athens, 9–11, 13, 15, 22n10, 28, 29, 31–40, 43, 44, 48n14, 49n26, 82–85, 88, 90, 100, 117–121, 124, 129, 144n7, 153, 154, 159–163, 165, 173, 180n19, 180n22, 188, 190, 200, 213, 214n8, 222, 225 Audience, 18, 19, 36, 38, 39, 49n35, 62, 79, 84, 85, 92, 107, 109n23, 115–117, 122–131, 133–136, 139–143, 144n8, 144n13, 145n15, 145n16, 150, 153–155, 158, 159, 165, 168, 169, 174, 178, 185, 188, 193, 198, 214n10, 226n2 Authorship, 3, 19, 143 B Ballet, 115, 139 Barton, John, 81 Batterham, Oscar, 151

Berkeley, Busby, 186 Birtwistle, Harrison, 185 Bogart, Anne, 19, 73, 167, 168, 171, 172, 178, 181n31 Bosse, Claudia, 197, 198, 208 Breath, 4, 6, 11, 14, 17, 18, 71, 72, 74n9, 81, 82, 96–107, 108n2, 110n30, 131, 133, 134, 151, 159, 196, 197, 200–205, 207, 209–213, 219 Brecht, Bertolt, 49n36, 54 Brook, Peter, 21n4 C Carson, Anne, 92, 93 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 29 Choreography, 5, 6, 19, 41, 164, 190, 191, 196, 197, 203, 207, 212, 213, 215n19 Chorus, 5, 8, 10–12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 33, 38, 41–44, 46, 49n29, 57, 60, 71, 80, 83, 85–90, 94, 101, 105–107, 109n25, 115–118, 122, 125, 126, 130, 139, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157–160, 163, 166, 175–178, 180n16, 181n30, 185–214, 219, 220 Cicero, 67 Classical reception, 6, 21n4, 44, 225 Classics classical ‘canon,’ 4, 36 in education, 65 Clod Ensemble, 6, 19, 198, 206, 213 Cognitive science, 14, 68 Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge, 108n2 Community, 6, 10, 19, 40, 53, 67, 116, 129, 130, 136, 143, 150, 155, 160–162, 176, 177, 188, 191, 194, 225, 227n10 Complicité, 175, 181n33, 200 Copeau, Jacques, 14

 INDEX 

D Damasio, Antonio, 75n22, 215n18 Dance, 7, 9–12, 41, 49n28, 54, 69, 84, 96, 151, 157, 161, 166, 180n14, 181n28, 187, 188, 191–193, 196, 214n12, 215n15, 215n21, 223 Dartnell, Guy, 104 Davies, Sasha Milavic, 150 Democracy, 30, 32, 37, 56, 119, 121, 180n22, 190, 214n7 Derrida, Jacques, 75n24 Descartes, René, 61 Devising, 2, 10, 16, 20, 116, 132, 143, 172, 181n31, 195 Didaskaliai, 33 Didáskalos, 12, 153 Diderot, Denis, 62 Dodin, Lev, 195 E Ensemble, 2–4, 8, 15, 43, 44, 73, 104, 143, 166, 168, 178, 186, 187, 189, 194–197, 209, 212, 213, 215n16, 219, 222 Epic, 10, 18, 28, 31, 34, 63, 84, 90, 106, 108n12, 117, 119, 121–124, 130, 135, 142, 145n24, 215n15, 223 Epidauros, 185 Euripides, 1, 12, 23n18, 28, 33–35, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47n2, 57, 60, 61, 65, 72, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 104, 110n35, 115, 117, 118, 121, 126, 134, 137, 145n14, 154, 155, 159, 172, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192 Alcestis, 118, 137–139, 172 Andromache, 117, 126, 134, 144n13

233

Bacchae, 56, 57, 72, 95, 110n35, 115–118, 129, 130, 134, 139, 143, 144n13, 192 Children of Heracles, 118 Cyclops, 154 Electra, 56, 71, 86, 87, 92, 95, 96, 102, 104, 117, 166, 189 Hecuba, 7, 117, 154, 166, 190, 191 Helen, 117, 118, 144n13, 172, 190 Heracles, 61, 118, 124, 125 Hippolytus, 110n35, 118, 172 Ion, 87, 118, 122, 134, 144n13, 154, 166 Iphigenia at Aulis, 117, 186, 196, 213 Iphigenia in Tauris, 1, 39, 47n2, 87, 118, 196 Medea, 35, 60, 155, 215n15 Orestes, 87, 92, 118, 145n14, 159 Phoenician Women, 87 The Suppliants, 118 Women of Troy, 186, 190, 195, 196, 213 F Farber, Yaël, 187 Festinger, Leon, 227n5 Festivals, 11, 22n8, 33, 36–38, 42, 49n25, 85, 107, 119, 121, 126, 150, 160–162, 180n19, 188 Findlay, Polly, 215n19 Fogerty, Elsie, 43 G Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices cheironomia, 215n21 musicality, 196, 197 mutuality, 196

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INDEX

Griffiths, Jane Montgomery, 18, 81, 91, 109n24 Grotowski, Jerzy, 21n4, 54 H Hall, Peter, 185, 186, 190 Harrison, Tony, 126, 144n1, 144n9 Hellenistic theatre, 33, 36, 41, 43, 214n6 Herodotus, 10, 117 Hicks, Greg, 185 Higgins, Clare, 128 Hodge, Ali, 104, 197 Homer, 84, 117, 123 Iliad, 84, 119, 121 Odyssey, 84, 109n14, 119, 121, 122 Horace, 214n6 Ars Poetica, 214n6 Hughes, Ted, 93 Humphery, Doris, 6 Hyperserials, 120 I Integrative training, 17, 220 Intercultural performance, 215n15 J James, William, 75n19 Johnson, Craig, 115 K Kabuki, 215n15 Kantor, Tadeusz, 195 Kathakali, 7, 215n15 Kneehigh Theatre, 18, 129, 132, 135 Kommos, 87, 89, 97, 105–106, 189

L Laban, Rudolph, 102, 110n34 Landau, Tina, 19, 73, 167, 168, 171, 172, 178, 181n31 League of Professional Theatre Training Program, 14 Lecoq, Jacques chorus exercises, 19 École Internationale de Théâtre, 166, 200 nature and elements, 206 seven levels of tension, 201 universal poetic awareness, 210 Leslie, Struan, 6, 19, 186, 195–197, 199, 212, 213, 215n17, 215n18 Linklater, Kristin, 97 Logocentrism, 6, 21n5, 69, 74n8 London Theatre Studio, 14 Lucskay, Róbert, 115 Lycurgan Athens, 49n26, 222 M Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne), 79 Masks, 1, 6, 90, 91, 109n21, 144n8, 185, 186, 215n15 Meisner, Sanford, 59 Messenger speeches, 18, 102, 110n35, 124, 134, 158 Method acting, 46 Metres, 81, 83, 85, 87–90, 93, 106 Michopoulou, Sofia, 95 Miller, Arthur, 56 Mimesis, 19, 72, 155, 177, 179n7, 213 Mitchell, Katie, 19, 186, 195–197, 199, 212, 213, 215n17, 215n18 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 215n15 Moscow Arts Theatre, 64 Musical theatre, 82, 186, 214n2

 INDEX 

Myths, 10, 28, 67, 84, 92, 118–122, 125–132, 142–143, 169, 188, 189, 213, 219, 222 N Naidu, Vayu, 136 National Theatre (London), 185, 186, 198 National Theatre Wales, 169, 170 Neuroscience, 14 Ngqoko Cultural Group, 187 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 192 Ninagawa, Yukio, 215n15 Noh Theatre, 215n15 O Old Vic School, 14 Olivier, Laurence, 94, 95, 109n27, 185 O’Neill, Eugene, 56 Opera, 23n20, 81, 82, 85, 96, 165 Opsis, 83, 152 Oral poetry, 144n4 Out of Joint (formerly Joint Stock), 145n21 Overlie, Mary, 181n31 P Pearson, Mike, 19, 168–170, 172–174, 178 Peisistratos, 22n8 Peloponnesian War, 109n14, 214n8 Performance objectives, 128, 129, 133–135, 141, 142 Performance storytelling, 18, 20, 130, 135 Phrynichus, 10 The Fall of Miletus, 10

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Plato Ion, 74n11, 87, 118, 122, 123, 134, 142, 144n13 Laws, 83, 84, 214n5 The Republic, 83 Plutarch Life of Alexander, 37 Lives of the Ten Orators (attributed), 33 Poiesis, 32 Postdramatic, 23n23 Pound, Ezra, 92 Psychoanalytic theory, 56 Psychophysical acting, 19, 54, 62, 223 Pythagoras, 83 Q Quintilian, 67 R Redgrave, Vanessa, 7 Rees, Gemma May, 150 Rhapsodes, 74n11, 122, 123, 134, 144n7, 144n8 Rhesus (unattributed tragedy), 117 Ribot, Théodule-Armand, 75n19 Rice, Emma, 18, 116, 117, 129, 130, 135, 136, 139, 143, 145n25 Rimini Protokoll, 216n22 Rituals, 10, 30, 32, 38, 84–86, 105, 106, 109n22, 116, 150, 158, 160–162, 174, 178, 185–188, 192, 193, 200, 214n12, 223 Rodenburg, Patsy, 97 Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 20, 43 Royal Lyceum Theatre (Edinburgh), 149 Royal Shakespeare Company, 7, 95

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INDEX

S Saint-Denis, Michel, 14 Scenography, 152, 153, 160, 185, 219 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 214n10 Shakespeare, William, 5, 48n22, 55, 81, 128, 129 Shanks, Michael, 47n5, 168 Shaw, Fiona, 95, 96 Site-specific practice, 2, 168, 169, 172, 173 Somatic practices, 23n19, 108n2 Sophocles Ajax, 117, 119, 154 Antigone, 18, 38, 45, 65, 79, 80, 85–89, 107, 109n24, 118, 139–141, 176, 189, 190, 215n19 Electra, 1, 2, 56, 71, 86, 87, 92, 95, 96, 102, 104, 166, 189 Oedipus, 57, 61, 94 Oedipus at Colonus, 118, 134, 189, 211 Philoctetes, 29, 117, 154, 172, 189 Women of Trachis, 124, 125, 189 Spaces, 2, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 19, 42, 46, 60, 64, 66, 67, 71, 73, 81, 83, 84, 90, 98, 100, 103, 107, 115, 116, 120, 127, 130–133, 149–178, 187, 191, 193, 194, 197–199, 202–206, 209–213, 219, 220, 223, 224 Stage directions, 125, 152, 153 Staniewski, Włodzimierz, 19, 104, 196, 197, 213 Stanislavski, Konstantin An Actor Prepares (trans. Hapgood), 58, 67, 74n6 An Actor’s Work (trans. Benedetti), 74n6, 128, 145n15, 165 An Actor’s Work on A Role (trans. Benedetti), 74n6 affective memory, 58

Building a Character (trans. Hapgood), 58, 74n6 circles of attention, 127, 130, 142 Creating a Role (trans. Hapgood), 58, 74n6 kinolenta (filmstrip), 64 Method of Physical Action, 59, 64, 69 My Life in Art, 227n4 Perezhivanie (lived experience), 74n5 psychological acting, 55, 167 psychophysical acting, 19, 54, 62, 223 quasi-scientific, 63, 64 the system, 62, 75n15 ‘Star’ actors, 33, 36–42 Stesichorus, 117 Stichomythia, 71, 80, 97 Strasberg, Lee, 58, 59 Suzuki, Tadashi, 215n15 T Teevan, Colin, 185 Terzopoulos, Theodorus, 95 Théâtre du Soleil, 215n15 Theatre-making, 2, 4, 15, 152, 164, 168, 178, 195, 210, 226 Theatre of Dionysus, 49n30, 107, 126, 154, 155, 161, 162, 164, 168, 169, 188 Theatrical storytelling, 129, 142, 143, 220 Thespis, 10, 90 Thiasos Theatre, 215n15 Topeng, 215n15 Tragedy (dramatic genre), 1, 9, 27, 53, 79, 117, 150, 185, 219 Translations, 12, 13, 18, 22n14, 22n15, 58, 65, 74n5,

 INDEX 

74n6, 81, 82, 91–94, 107, 109n22, 109n23, 145n15, 179n10, 185, 221 V Viewpoints, 19, 73, 167, 168, 171, 172, 178, 181n31 Vitez, Antoine, 92

W Warner, Deborah, 95, 96 Wertenbaker, Timberlake, 93 Willson, Suzy, 6, 198, 206, 208 Y Yakim, Moni, 97, 98 Yoga, 59, 97, 99, 110n33, 227n4

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